ABSTRACT
Soviet military intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli War of Attrition – a war that took place between March 1969 and August 1970 – is a remarkable event in the history of the ‘Cold War’. Never before this confrontation had the USSR put its military forces in jeopardy for a Middle Eastern country. However, in spring 1970, Moscow deployed an Air Defense (AD) division of about 10,000 men, including two regiments of jet fighters, in Egypt. Traditional historiography has interpreted the Soviet act as a reaction to Israeli deep-penetration raids in January 1970; however, recently declassified material refutes this assumption and gives credence to the claim that Moscow’s decision to introduce Soviet units into Egypt – dubbed Operation ‘Kavkaz’ (‘Caucasus’) – was taken months before Egyptian-Israeli hostilities broke out. The initial Soviet decision did not derive from regional considerations, but was formulated within the global context of the Cold War, specifically vis-a`- vis NATO and threats projected by the presence of US forces in the Mediterranean. However, in the late summer of 1969, as a result of the severe deterioration in Egypt’s position during the War of Attrition, Moscow decided to change its forces’ objective and introduce an AD division in order to save its regional client. It was the Soviet response to Egypt’s increasing difficulties in confronting the Israeli Air Force (IAF) which from July 1969 was used as ‘flying artillery’ to compensate for the weaknesses in the ground artillery of the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) during this static war along the Suez Canal.1
