Prominent Arab and Israeli figures say Middle Eastern countries must “keep pushing” for peace a year and a half after the breakthrough Abraham Accords, which cleared the path for diplomatic normalization between Israel and several long-hostile Arab powers, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, UAE National Council Member Ali Rashid Al Nuaimi and former Israeli Knesset Deputy Speaker Hilik Bar promoted a message of dramatic positive change in the Middle East since the Trump administration ushered in a radical overhaul of the region’s diplomatic landscape in September 2020.

With Israeli-Palestinian violence spiking this week and a spate of attacks by Iran-allied militants rocking other parts of the region, the tone of a special online panel discussion that the three attended Thursday was sober. Mr. Al Nuaimi said it was vital to remain optimistic.

“We have to understand that in our region there are enemies of peace and those who will try to undermine what we are doing, but we should have the courage to take the lead,” said the UAE official.

He said supporters of peace must push to expand the Abraham Accords in the years ahead.

“When it comes to engaging with peace, there is no other option,” said Mr. Al Nuaimi, who chairs the UAE National Council’s Defense, Interior and Foreign Affairs Committee. “We have to keep the momentum, keep pushing and engaging everyone, not only those countries who signed the Abraham Accords.

“There is no way back,” he said, “regardless how the American administration looks at this, or the Europeans. This is our path. This is our decision. We have to fight for it and push for it and engage all those who love peace, who believe in peace in the world actually, to work with us to transform this region.”

Mr. Olmert praised an Israeli summit Monday where the foreign ministers of Egypt, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco, along with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, promoted further dialogue, urged other Arab countries to join the Abraham Accords framework, and pledged to expand cooperation on energy, environmental and security matters.

Sudan, a fourth Arab country that moved to normalize ties with Israel after the initial round of Abraham Accords was signed in 2020, did not attend the summit in Israel, reflecting domestic turmoil after an October military coup.

Mr. Olmert said Thursday that the manner in which the other six nations “gathered together in a very friendly and respectful way is a signal that something dramatically has changed in the Middle East as a result of the Abraham Accords — there is no question about it.”

Mr. Bar agreed. “It is evident that a year and a half after signing the first Abraham Accord, the unity among nations is growing together,” he said. “This fact sends a very strong message that peace-loving citizens of the Middle East will prevail over conflict, terror and war.”
 
Mr. Bar, Mr. Olmert, Mr. Al Nuaimi and others, including former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, spoke during an online panel discussion presented Thursday by the Middle East Peace Initiative Forum and hosted by the Universal Peace Federation, a global interreligious network of individuals and organizations dedicated to promoting world peace. The UPF was co-founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han Moon, who together founded The Washington Times in 1982.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican, praised the Abraham Accords in a recorded video message. He said the Biden administration has not done enough to embrace and promote the normalization agreements, which he described as a symbol of unity between Arab powers and Israel against Iran.

The current administration, Mr. Gingrich said, is undermining the accords by pushing for a diplomatic detente with Iran and a renewal of the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran. President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal in 2018.

“It’s a very important step to try to make sure that the Middle East doesn’t just slide into a total disaster based on the desperation of the Biden administration wanting to get an agreement with Iran no matter what the cost,” he said.
 
“What you have is the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt and Israel coming together to create an Abraham Accords alliance, because they all recognize that the Iranian dictatorship — with its open statement of desire to dominate, with its leading support for terrorism, with its effort to get both nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles — is really, really dangerous,” Mr. Gingrich said. “The current administration, unfortunately, is following a policy that empowers and strengthens the Iranian dictatorship.”

Mr. Al Nuaimi rejected the notion that the Abraham Accords was meant as a regional check to Iran. He said the agreements are much broader in philosophical scope and symbolize the potential for peace across the whole of the Middle East, Iran included.

“The Abraham Accords is not a political agreement, it’s not a security agreement, it’s not an agreement, you know, to counter Iran,” Mr. Al Nuaimi said. “It’s a platform to change the region. It’s an agent of change for the whole region, you know, to transform into a new region where everyone will enjoy security, stability [and] prosperity, where the Israelis will feel that they are part of this region, that, you know, they belong here, their root is here.”

He highlighted person-to-person exchanges and the dramatic opening of tourism between Israel and the UAE since the Abraham Accords were signed. Some 300,000 Israelis visited the Emirates over the past six months for the World Expo 2022 in Dubai, he said.

Still, the Abraham Accords has yet to overcome the challenges of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an issue that loomed over the summit in Israel this week. Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told reporters that he and other Arab leaders “highlight[ed] the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process [and the] importance of maintaining the credibility and viability of the two-state solution” during the summit, according to The Associated Press.

The Biden administration has called on Israelis and Palestinians to create conditions for renewing peace talks that broke down more than a decade ago. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has long opposed a separate Palestinian state and has declined to restart peace talks. Instead, he has called for steps to improve economic conditions for the Palestinians to help reduce tensions.

Mr. Olmert said that “the main thing that still remains to be seen is the future negotiations between [Israelis] and the Palestinians.”

“I’m not so certain that we can put the blame for the lack of this process on one side,” he said. “I think that both sides should do a lot more to move forward and establish the necessary foundations for negotiations.”

“Considering the fact that there is the Abraham Accords peace … the Palestinians must be on top of the agenda,” Mr. Olmert said. “We need to work together to work forward rapidly, seriously and responsibly in order to create the kind of understanding, which is a preliminary requirement for furthering the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians toward a full peace treaty.”

Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee say red tape and the Biden administration’s aversion to risk are holding up a deal to transfer Soviet-era surface-to-air missiles to Ukraine as Kyiv seeks to fend off a Russian invasion.

Weeks after Slovakia’s defense minister offered to provide Ukraine with S-300 surface-to-air missiles, the Pentagon has yet to hammer out an agreement and the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee said he can’t get a straight answer on what’s holding up the deal. Slovakia’s deal was contingent on getting assurances the missiles would be replaced, almost certainly by Washington.

“They’ve been working on it for two weeks,” Rep. Mike Rogers from Alabama said Thursday. “This is not brain surgery. We know what they need. We know what we’ve got. Give it to them.”

“There’s clearly some political reason why they’re not doing it,” he added. “I just want them to tell me.”

The Pentagon and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has pleaded with Western allies to help Ukraine battle Russia’s bombardment of his country with a NATO-enforced no-fly zone and fighter jets to protect Ukraine’s skies. NATO countries have rejected those requests for fear of being drawn into a direct war with Moscow.

Earlier this month, Slovakia’s Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad offered to transfer Soviet-era S-300 surface-to-air missile systems in Slovakia’s inventory to Ukraine, but said any transfer would require a “proper replacement.” But Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said he did not have any immediate response on Slovakia’s offer or on whether the U.S. was ready to replace the missiles in Slovakia’s arsenal.

“These are things that we will continue to work on with all of our allies, and certainly this is not just a U.S. issue — it’s a NATO issue,” he said.

Germany and the Netherlands have begun transferring components of the U.S.-made Patriot missile defense system to Slovakia temporarily, but Slovakian officials say they need a more permanent solution before sending their S-300s to Ukraine. Republican lawmakers say the U.S. should step up and provide the backfill.

“We need to get them there because the [Slovaks] are ready to give them now,” Mr. Rogers said. 

Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Celeste Wallander told a House Armed Services Committee hearing this week that the U.S. was still considering the proposal.

“We are working on this, and meanwhile we have focused on getting countries that hold Soviet legacy systems, including S-300 systems ― that have spare parts, missiles, different parts of that S-300 ― who are willing to send that to Ukraine,” she said before asking to provide more details in a classified setting.

On Thursday, Mr. Rogers said he had yet to receive a more detailed explanation behind the hold-up. 

Rep. Mike Gallagher, Wisconsin Republican and a member of the committee, said the delay signals a lack of urgency from the administration.

“I know it’s complicated,” Mr. Gallagher said. “But when you have Slovakia offering to send [the S-300s], we have to take advantage of that. If it was a priority, I feel like we could get it figured out.”

President Biden has signed off on more than $1 billion in aid to Ukraine since the start of the war, including Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, Javelin anti-tank missiles and millions of rounds of small arms ammunition, while imposing harsh sanctions on the Russian economy.

But the president has walked a fine line to avoid further escalating the war. Earlier this month, the administration scuttled an offer by Poland to supply Kyiv with Soviet-era MiG fighter jets that would be transshipped through a U.S. military base in Germany. The Pentagon said the Polish offer as structured was “not feasible” and could prove provocative to Russia.

Mr. Rogers said the hangup with the Slovakian S-300 offer raises questions about whether other aid to Ukraine is being held up.

“If we can’t do this right, what makes us think we’re getting this aid to them in a timely fashion.”

Other Republicans have raised similar concerns.

House Oversight Committee top Republican Rep. James Comer, Kentucky Republican, on Thursday, penned a letter along with his GOP colleagues calling for the committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, New York Democrat, to convene an oversight hearing to ensure “the distributed effectively and efficiently to best support” the Ukrainian military and civilians.

“Russia’s war against Ukraine has led to thousands of civilian deaths, millions of refugees, millions more internally displaced, shortages of food, energy, and other necessities,” the lawmakers wrote. “We must ensure that typical red tape and federal bureaucracy do not delay this aid from reaching the Ukrainian people or lead to taxpayer dollars going to bad actors.”

President Biden on Thursday said Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to have removed most of his advisers and is increasingly isolated in his decision-making about the war in Ukraine.

Mr. Biden said the Russian president “seems to be self-isolated.”

“There’s some indication that he has fired or put under house arrest some of his advisers,” he told reporters without citing evidence. “But I don’t want to put too much stock in that at this time because we don’t have that much evidence.”

Mr. Biden also said there is no intelligence suggesting Russia is keeping its promise to drastically scale back its military operations around Kyiv, the Ukraine capital. There is evidence, however, that Mr. Putin is bolstering his forces in the eastern Donbas region, one of two separatist territories that Russia has recognized as an independent nation.

“The idea he‘s pulling all of his troops out from Kyiv and moving them south, there’s no evidence that he‘s done that,” Mr. Biden said.

Hours earlier, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that he’s not seeing Russia keep its pledge to reduce military activity around Kyiv.

“According to our intelligence, Russian units are not withdrawing but repositioning,” Mr. Stoltenberg said. “Russia is trying to regroup, resupply and reinforce its offensive in the Donbas region.”

Russia said Tuesday that it will scale back its violent invasion of areas near the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, giving the first sign of a possible breakthrough in talks aimed at persuading Moscow to end its more than month-old military assault that has left thousands dead and sent nearly 4 million Ukrainians fleeing the country.

Ukrainian and Russian negotiators meeting in Istanbul on Tuesday signaled momentum toward an agreement to freeze or end the war.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration reacted cautiously to Russia’s claim that it was pulling back its forces amid reports of ongoing attacks in other parts of the country.

President Biden suggested he is hopeful but remains highly circumspect of Russian overtures. “We’ll see,” the president said. “I don’t read anything into it until I see what their actions are.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that Russian pledges to pull back its largely stalled assaults on Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv could be an attempt to “deceive people” and deflect attention from fresh attempts to seize besieged Ukrainian cities in the south and east.

“There is what Russia says and there is what Russia does, and we’re focused on the latter,” Mr. Blinken told reporters during a visit to Morocco on Tuesday. “And what Russia is doing is the continued brutalization of Ukraine.”

Despite the official caution, U.S. and world stock markets were up again on the suggestion of good news, while the price of oil and other commodities fell.

Russian and Ukrainian officials told reporters after talks in Istanbul — the first round of talks between the two sides in more than two weeks — that a summit between Mr. Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy could occur sooner than expected if a draft peace agreement can be reached over the coming days.

The progress was made despite the uproar provoked by Mr. Biden’s comments over the weekend in Poland that Mr. Putin must be driven from power for starting the war. The Kremlin’s top spokesman denounced the remarks but said they shouldn’t stand in the way of diplomacy.

“Dialogue between Russia and the United States is necessary in any case,” Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “One way or another, sooner or later, we will have to talk about the issues of strategic stability, security and so on.”

Mr. Biden held a conference call with other Western leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The White House readout of the call offered no reaction by the other leaders to Mr. Biden’s weekend remarks.

Mr. Zelenskyy injected momentum into the negotiations by announcing that he is prepared to declare Ukraine a neutral nation as long as its security can be guaranteed by other countries. Ukrainian officials say they will not cede any territory because of the war but have proposed to put off a final decision on contested areas such as Crimea for a decade or more.

The Ukrainian leader, who has remained in Kyiv as the fighting raged nearby, praised his army’s “courageous and effective actions” in a video address Tuesday evening in forcing the apparent pullback by Russian forces. But he said he remained deeply skeptical of “the words coming from representatives of the country that continue fighting to destroy us.”

“We can say the signals we are receiving from the talks are positive, but they do not drown out the explosions of Russian shells,” he said. “The Russian army still has significant potential to continue attacks against our state. Therefore, we are not reducing our defensive efforts.”

Russia has pointedly demanded that Ukraine never be made a part of the U.S.-aligned NATO. But Russian negotiators responded positively when Ukraine’s delegation in Istanbul laid out a framework for Ukrainian neutrality, with the nation’s security guaranteed by a group of third countries, including the U.S., Britain, France, Turkey, China and Poland.

Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said Moscow has decided to “fundamentally … cut back military activity in the direction” of Kyiv and Chernihiv. He called it a move to “increase mutual trust and create conditions for further negotiations.”

Vladimir Medinskiy, the head of the Russian delegation, said on Russian TV that the Ukrainian proposals are a “step to meet us halfway, a clearly positive fact.” He cautioned that the parties are still far from reaching an agreement but said: “We now know how to move further toward compromise. We aren’t just marking time in talks.”

Mr. Fomin stopped short of spelling out what a Russian pullback near Kyiv would mean in practical terms, and there were signs that Moscow was ramping up its attacks in other areas of Ukraine.

Even as talks were getting underway in Turkey, Russian forces blasted a gaping hole in a nine-story government administration building during an assault on the southern Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv, killing at least 12 people, emergency authorities said. CNN reported that shelling was heard in the capital of Kyiv on Tuesday evening.

Still, Ukrainian military officials said they have noticed some Russian forces digging in and, in some cases, pulling back from areas they had occupied around Kyiv and Chernihiv in recent days.

Bogged down

While Moscow has portrayed this as a goodwill gesture, U.S. and Western European military sources say the Russian troops have become bogged down and taken heavy losses in their bid to seize Kyiv and other cities. Military analysts say Russia’s hopes of a lightning capture of Ukraine’s main cities after the decision to invade on Feb. 24 have been frustrated by the unexpectedly tough resistance put up by Ukrainian forces.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said U.S. officials haven’t seen anything to corroborate Russian claims to be significantly pulling back from areas around Kyiv. “But what we have seen over the last couple of days is they have stopped trying to advance on Kyiv,” Mr. Kirby told CNN.

All the while, the Kremlin has appeared to be lowering its war aims, saying its “main goal” now is securing control of the mostly Russian-speaking Donbas region in eastern Ukraine — part of which has been occupied by Moscow-backed Ukrainian separatists since 2014.

Western officials say Moscow is now reinforcing troops in the Donbas in an attempt to encircle Ukraine’s best-trained and best-equipped forces, which are concentrated near the eastern region.

The Russian assault on the Black Sea port city of Mariupol has left an unknown number of civilians trapped and suffering amid the ruins of buildings destroyed after weeks of Russian rocket attacks and aerial bombings.

Several other Ukrainian cities have been reduced to ruins. Ukrainian military officials said Russian forces have destroyed more than 60 religious buildings across the country during the five weeks of war, with most of the damage concentrated near Kyiv and in eastern Ukraine.

Other sensitive buildings have also been under attack.

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency arrived in Ukraine on Tuesday to try to ensure the safety of the country’s nuclear facilities. Russian forces have taken control of the decommissioned Chernobyl plant, the site in 1986 of the world’s worst nuclear accident, and of the active Zaporizhzhia plant, where a building was damaged in fighting.

Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who addressed a U.N. Security Council meeting on food security, called out Mr. Putin for launching “his premeditated, unprovoked, unjustified, and brutal invasion,” which has left nearly a quarter of Ukraine’s population displaced, “including more than half of the nation’s children.”

“The World Food Program warns that 45% of people in Ukraine — nearly half of the people living in one of the world’s great breadbaskets — are concerned about having enough to eat,” Ms. Sherman said in prepared remarks.

“The impacts of Putin’s war are being felt far beyond Ukraine’s borders as well,” she said. “Ukraine and Russia are both major agricultural producers. Thirty percent of the world’s wheat exports typically come from the Black Sea region, as does 20% of the world’s corn and 75% of sunflower oil.”

European nations have continued to rally behind Ukraine and impose harsh economic sanctions on Russia. In an apparently coordinated action to tackle Russian espionage, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Ireland and North Macedonia collectively expelled scores of Russian diplomats.

Poland last week expelled 45 Russians whom the government identified as intelligence officers using their diplomatic status as cover to operate in the country.

• This article is based in part on wire service reports.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought about a complete sea change in German policy, a shift Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a Feb. 28 address called a “zeitenwende” — the dawn of a new era. The country long condemned as a laggard in NATO for its skimpy defense budgets and cautious foreign policy suddenly was earmarking some $110 billion for the armed forces within weeks and pledged it would meet the NATO defense spending target of 2% of GDP.

The captain of the ship for the sea change is Christine Lambrecht, a veteran of Mr. Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party who was appointed defense minister in December. In her first visit to Washington since the revolution in German defense policy was announced, she pledged Tuesday that her ministry will turn rhetoric into action. Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, is as close to Berlin as Chicago is to the White House, she said during an online discussion sponsored by the Atlantic Council think tank.

Germany, long the economic engine of Europe, now appears determined to hold its security obligations as well. Prodded by the shock of Russia‘s invasion, the left-leaning new government has made security and spending commitments on defense that would have been unthinkable just a year ago under then-Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“For us as Germans, these are days of shock,” Ms. Lambrecht said. “This new reality is now very clear to Germany. There are more than 200,000 Ukrainians who fled to Germany in fear for their lives.”

Within hours of the first Russian tank rolling across the border into Ukraine, Lt. Gen. Alfons Mais, chief of the German Army, complained on social media that the military — known as the Bundeswehr — had been neglected for years. Only 40 out of 350 of the Army’s Puma combat vehicles were considered combat-ready and the other services didn’t fare much better. Fewer than 30% of German warships were considered fully operational and many of the nation’s jet fighters weren’t airworthy, according to the Agence France-Presse news agency.

Analysts say Germany completely reversed its post-Cold War foreign policy within days of the invasion, vowing to beef up its woefully underfunded armed forces and radically scale back commercial and energy ties to Moscow. Mr. Scholz’s government also announced it would halt the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia, a project both the Trump and Biden administrations had looked on with suspicion.

“Germany also supports the unprecedented tough sanctions imposed on Russia,” Ms. Lambrecht said. “Germany supports NATO when it comes to strengthening the eastern flank.”

She cited the decision to purchase up to 35 U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets to replace Germany’s aging fleet of Tornado aircraft. The decision means it will have a fighter capable of carrying U.S.-made nuclear weapons stored in Germany. 

“We will actively assume this new role in close cooperation with our American and European allies and partners,” she said. “We fully take on that responsibility and we are serious about it.”

Germany’s postwar governments tended to focus on detente and diplomacy, relying on the U.S. military to shield them from the Soviet Union or other threats. The invasion of Ukraine, long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has changed the equation in Europe. 

“We do need the [NATO] alliance and we do need the strength of the United States,” said Ms. Lambrecht, who will meet with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and lawmakers on Capitol Hill on her visit this week.

Helping to provide security for Europe will pay off for the security of the U.S., she said.

“It strengthens the freedoms and values here in the U.S. because these values are also our values,” Ms. Lambrecht said. “It is those shared American and European values that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is attacking with his greed for more power.”

President Biden on Tuesday took a wait-and-see approach to Russia’s claim that it had “drastically” reduced its military activity near the Ukraine capital of Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv.

“We’ll see,” Mr. Biden said at a joint press conference with Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. “I don’t read anything into it until I see what their actions are. We’ll see if they follow through with what they’ve suggested.”

“Let’s just see what they have to offer, but in the meantime, we are going to continue to keep strong with the sanctions, we are going to continue to provide the Ukrainian military with the capacity to defend themselves and we are going to keep a close eye on what’s going on,” he said.

Earlier Tuesday, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said Moscow would reduce its military presence in Kyiv and Chernihiv. 

His comments suggested that some progress may have been made during negotiations between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Istanbul for a fresh round of peace talks.