Evidence of Vladimir Putin’s intention to veto an anti-Israel UN Security Council Resolution that then-President Obama considered proposing shortly before he left office was found in recently declassified phone conversations between US President Donald Trump’s former adviser Michael Flynn and Russia’s ambassador to the US at the time Sergey Kislyak, The Jerusalem Post reported on Thursday.

As YWN reported last week, a Yisrael Hayom report revealed that not only did the US abandon long-standing US policy to support Israel in the UN and abstain from vetoing the anti-Israel UN Resolution 2334 in 2016 but Obama decided shortly later to propose an even more damaging anti-Israel resolution that would have forced Israel to establish a Palestinian state on the 1948 armistice lines. Fortunately, Putin was convinced by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to oppose the resolution and Obama dropped the idea once he was informed that Putin would veto it.

The report was subsequently confirmed by an Israeli official last week as quoted in a previous Post article. The US and Russia denied the reports of Obama’s planned resolution but the Flynn-Kislyak transcripts declassified late last month refute those denials.

The transcripts show that on December 29, 2016 – mere days after Resolution 2334 passed – Ambassador Kislyak called Flynn.

“Since you were interested in the issue of the Middle East and you called me on that issue,” Kislyak said, “we wanted to convey to you and through you to the president-elect that we have significant reservations about the idea of adopting now the principles for the Middle East that our American colleagues are pushing for.”

“So we are not going to support it in the quartet or in the Security Council, and we have conveyed [that] to our American colleagues,” Kislyak concluded.

Flynn responded: “Okay, that’s good” and later in the conversation said: “I appreciate very much the reservations about the current administration’s position on the Middle East. That does not do anybody any good right now with… the situation with Hamas and the Palestinian situation. I mean, we’ll come up with a solution that’s good for everybody.”

Kislyak clarified to Flynn that Russia’s opposition to the proposal was not necessarily about the creation of a Palestinian state but about the process the US was proposing to get there: “You cannot just create facts on the ground that are not going to be implemented afterward,” he said.

The Post also reported that Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova denied on Wednesday night that Putin had anything to do with stopping the resolution, saying it was “disinformation,” “absurd allegations” and “absolutely fantastic.”

Zakharova asserted that Russia has recognized a Palestinian state within pre-1967 borders since 1988 and that Russia continues to support negotiations for a two-state solution.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)