JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — President Joe Biden on Saturday will lay out his strategy for the Middle East as he closes out of the final leg of a four-day trip meant to bolster U.S. positioning and knit the region together against Iran.

In the Red Sea port city of Jeddah, Biden will meet with heads of state from six Arab Gulf countries, plus Egypt, Jordan and Iraq for a regional summit. Hours before the Gulf Cooperation Council summit, the White House released satellite imagery that indicates Russian officials have twice visited Iran in recent weeks for a showcase of weapons-capable drones it is looking to acquire for use in its ongoing war in Ukraine.

None of the countries represented at the summit have moved in lockstep with the U.S. to sanction Russia, a key foreign policy priority for the Biden administration. If anything, the UAE has emerged as a sort of financial haven for Russian billionaires and their multimillion-dollar yachts. Egypt remains open to Russian tourists.

Release of the satellite imagery—which shows Russian officials visited Kashan Airfield on June 8 and July 15 to get a look at the drones—could help the administration better tie the relevance of the war to many Arab nations own concerns about Iran’s nuclear ambitions and other malign activity in the region.

A senior Biden administration officials, who briefed reporters ahead of the summit, said that Moscow’s efforts to acquire drones from Tehran show that Russia is “effectively making a bet on Iran.”

The gathering of leaders comes a day after he championed steps toward normalizing ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and sought to rebuild cooperation with the Saudi king and crown prince after once promising to make the kingdom a “pariah” for its human rights abuses.

When he speaks to the Gulf Cooperation Council and its Arab allies, the White House said, Biden will offer his most fulsome vision yet for the region and how the U.S. can cooperate with it.

The U.S. is expected

His first Middle East trip comes 11 months after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and as Biden aims to reprioritize the U.S. away from the Middle East’s ruinous wars and ongoing conflicts stretching from Libya to Syria.

“It’s a strategy fit for purpose for 2022 as opposed to the two decades of major land wars that the U.S. fought in this region over the course of the 2000s,” Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters in a preview of the speech.

Energy prices — elevated since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — were expected to be high on the agenda. But Biden aides tempered expectations that he would leave with a deal for regional producers to immediately boost supply.

“I suspect you won’t see that for another couple of weeks,” Biden told reporters late Friday.

At the summit, Biden was set to hear a chorus of concern about the region’s stability and security, as well as concerns about food security, climate change and the continued threat of terrorism.

Overall, there’s little that the nine Mideast heads of state agree on when it comes to foreign policy. For example, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates are trying to isolate and squeeze Iran over its regional reach and proxies. Oman and Qatar, on the other hand, have solid diplomatic ties with Iran and have acted as intermediaries for talks between Washington and Tehran.

Qatar recently hosted talks between U.S. and Iranian officials as they try to revive Iran’s nuclear accord. Iran not only shares a huge underwater gas field with Qatar in the Persian Gulf, it rushed to Qatar’s aid when Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt cut off ties and imposed a years-long embargo on Qatar that ended only shortly before Biden took office.

Biden’s actions have frustrated some of the leaders. While the U.S. has played an important role in encouraging a months-long ceasefire in Yemen, Biden’s decision to reverse a Trump-era move that had listed Yemen’s rebel Houthis as a terrorist group has outraged the Emirati and Saudi leadership.

On Friday, Biden fist-bumped Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto leader, as he arrived at the royal palace in Jeddah. But he rejected the notion that he was ignoring the kingdom’s human rights abuses as he tries to reset a fraught diplomatic relationship.

“I said, very straightforwardly, for an American president to be silent on an issue of human rights is inconsistent with who we are and who I am,” Biden said. “I’ll always stand up for our values.”

U.S. intelligence believes that the crown prince likely approved the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S.-based writer, four years ago. Biden said Prince Mohammed claimed that he was “not personally responsible” for the death. “I indicated I thought he was,” the president said he replied.

As for U.S. concerns over China’s expanding reach, China appears willing to provide Saudi Arabia with missile and nuclear technologies that the U.S. is much more hesitant to do. China is also the kingdom’s biggest buyer of Saudi oil.

For Iraq, which has the deepest and strongest links to Iran of all the Arab countries, its presence at the meeting reflects Saudi efforts — supported by the U.S. — to bring Iraq closer to Arab positions and the so-called Arab fold. Iraq has hosted around five rounds of direct talks between Saudi and Iranian officials since Biden took office, though the talks have produced little results.

Ahead of the summit, Iraq’s Prime Minister Mustafa al-Khadhimi, who survived an assassination attempt with armed drones in November, wrote in Foreign Policy that Iraq faces many problems, but is working “to solve Iraqi problems with Iraqi solutions”.

“When U.S. President Joe Biden comes to the Middle East this week, he will be arriving in a region facing numerous challenges, from terrorism to food insecurity and climate change,” he wrote. “But the Middle East is also a region that is increasingly facing those challenges together under a group of leaders pursuing positive change.”

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JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia, July 16 (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden will discuss regional missile and defence capabilities on Saturday when he meets Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia, where he will be seeking to integrate Israel as part of a new axis largely driven by shared concerns over Iran, said a senior administration official.

“We believe there’s great value in including as many of the capabilities in this region as possible and certainly Israel has significant air and missile defence capabilities, as they need to. But we’re having these discussion bilaterally with these nations,” the administration official told reporters.

Biden, on his first Middle East trip as president, has focused on the planned summit with six Gulf states and Egypt, Jordan and Iraq while downplaying meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. That encounter has drawn criticism in the United States over human rights abuses.

Biden had promised to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” on the global stage over the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents, but ultimately decided U.S. interests dictated a recalibration, not a rupture, in relations with the world’s top oil exporter and Arab powerhouse. read more

Biden needs the help of OPEC giant Saudi Arabia at a time of high crude prices and other problems related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and as he encourages efforts to end the Yemen war, where a temporary truce is in place. Washington also wants to curb Iran’s sway in the region and China’s global influence.

The administration official said the United States is hopeful it will see an OPEC production boost in the coming weeks. Biden is expected to press other Gulf producers to pump more oil. The OPEC+ alliance, which includes Russia, meets next on Aug. 3.

The U.S. president, who started his trip to the region with a visit to Israel, will hold bilateral talks with leaders of Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Iraq before taking part in the wider summit where he will “lay out clearly” his vision and strategy for America’s engagement in the Middle East, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Friday.

“He’s intent on ensuring that there is not a vacuum in the Middle East for China and Russia to fill,” Sullivan said.

Another senior administration official said Biden would announce that the United States has committed $1 billion in new near and long term food security assistance for the Middle East and North Africa, and that Gulf states would commit $3 billion over the next two years in projects that align with U.S. partnerships in global infrastructure and investment.

Gulf states, which have refused to side with the West against Russia in the Ukraine conflict, are in turn seeking a concrete commitment from the United States to strategic ties that have been strained over perceived U.S. disengagement from the region.

IRAN CONCERNS

Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have been frustrated by U.S. conditions on arms sales and for being excluded from indirect U.S.-Iran talks aimed at reviving a 2015 nuclear pact that they see as flawed for not tackling regional concerns about Tehran’s missile programme and behaviour.

“The most important demand from the Saudi leadership and other Gulf leaders — and Arabs in general — is clarity of U.S. policy and its direction towards the region,” said Abdulaziz Sager, chairman of Riyadh-based Gulf Research Center.

Israel, which shares their concerns over Iran, encouraged Biden’s trip to the kingdom, hoping it would foster a warming between Saudi Arabia and Israel as part of a wider Arab rapprochement after the UAE and Bahrain forged ties with Israel in U.S.-brokered pacts that received Riyadh’s blessings.

In a sign of progress under what Biden described as a groundbreaking process, Saudi Arabia said on Friday it would open its airspace to all air carriers, paving the way for more overflights to and from Israel.

Washington and Riyadh also announced the removal of U.S. and other peacekeepers from Tiran — an island between Saudi Arabia and Egypt in a strategic position leading to the Israeli port of Eilat. The troops have been stationed as part of accords reached in 1978 and which led to a peace deal between Israel and Egypt.

A plan to connect air defence systems could be a hard sell for Arab states that do not have ties with Israel and balk at being part of an alliance seen as against Iran, which has built a strong network of proxies around the region including in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen.

Senior Emirati official Anwar Gargash said on Friday the idea of a so-called Middle East NATO was difficult and that bilateral cooperation was faster and more effective. read more

The UAE, he said, would not back a confrontational approach: “We are open to cooperation, but not cooperation targeting any other country in the region and I specifically mention Iran.”

Additional reporting by Maha El Dahan in Jeddah and John Irish in Paris
Writing by Ghaida Ghantous
Editing by Daniel Wallis and Frances Kerry

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

In a live streamed address to students, faculty and staff at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Israel to join the network of countries around the world that have placed sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

“We are grateful to your great nation. But we would like to also get support from your government,” Zelensky said. “Tell me, how can you not help the victim of such aggression?”

In his address, Zelensky recognized the connected histories of Ukraine and Israel, noting the Ukrainian origins of Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, Zionist leader Zev Jabotinsky and many others.

He also noted that the Russian shelling of Ukrainian cities has affected many Jewish historical sites, such as the memorial at Babyn Yar, where at least 33,000 Jews were murdered by Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators in 1941. At least five people were killed in the Russian shelling at Babyn Yar in March.

“The occupiers are not discretional in how they fight,” Zelensky said, adding that more than 2,000 schools have been targeted by Russian missiles and shelling, according to the Ukrainian government.

“This is about values and general security. Everyone who is willing to destroy another nation has to be held accountable,” he said. “Many European countries act together with us against Russian aggression. And unfortunately, we have not yet seen Israel join the sanctions regime.”

In a question and answer portion after Zelensky’s prepared speech, a student born in Ukraine asked whether Ukraine has received any support from international Jewish organizations to address the destruction of historic Jewish sites.

“We have received support from the Jewish Congress and U.S.,” Zelensky said. “I did want to have more of that support from the government of Israel on that particular question, because this is our joint sorrow, and that’s what it is. Just simply wanted to have more of it. But I’m not trying to hint at anything. It’s just as painful to us here in Ukraine as it is to Israel. This is a big tragedy. And I think I have nothing to add here.”

During the Q&A, another student told Zelensky that her father was fighting in the war. She asked whether the government of Ukraine would consider adopting a mandatory military service in the future, similar to the one that exists in Israel.

“This is one of the models that we are considering,” Zelensky said. “I’m not sure that this will be the exact model that we will follow, but it will be on the table and it will be discussed with the civil society.”

He added that even without a draft, Ukrainians already know how to fight. “They have been defending our country with no weapons, with bare hands — but now with weapons.”

Yishai Fraenkel, vice president of the university, asked what the future of Ukraine might look like when the war ends.

Zelensky said there are plans for post-war reforms and improved military defense systems, and emphasized a future with the European Union.

“We are moving towards a new civilization,” he said. “And we have sacrificed a lot for that. But the most important is that this is our choice.”

“Of course, we’re still very young, but first and foremost, this is for our children,” he continued. “So we will be building a European state, which will be part of the European Union.”

He added that Ukraine and Israel have “a great future” together.

“Please remember how much we are linked, how close our ties are,” he said. “I do care about our future relations between our states and our people. This is why I’m being sincere. And I’m sure that the war will end and we will win. And we do have a joint future. A great future.”

Her son Eric Trump said it was “a very sad day, a very sad day,” as he left the home Thursday.

A Czech-born ski racer and businesswoman, Ivana Trump was born Ivana Zelnickova in 1949.

She was married to the former president from 1977 to 1992, and they had three children together: Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric.

The Trumps became a 1980s power couple, and she managed one of his Atlantic City casinos as well as helped with the décor of Trump Tower. Their marriage ended in a messy, public divorce after Donald Trump met his next wife, Marla Maples.

But in recent years, Ivana Trump had been on good terms with her ex-husband. She wrote in a 2017 book that they spoke about once a week.

Her death came during a fraught time for the Trump family. Two of her children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, as well as the former president were due to appear in the coming days for questioning in the New York attorney general’s civil investigation into the family’s business practices. But the attorney general’s office agreed to postpone the depositions — a term for out-of-court questioning under oath — because of Ivana Trump’s death.