MOSCOW — Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Moscow today, his second trip to the Russian capital in three months. The previous visit at the end of February saw Netanyahu and President Vladimir Putin put the crisis in Russian-Israeli relations over a downed Russian plane in Syria “behind them” — the first step in getting bilateral coordination to the level desired by both leaders.

At that meeting, Netanyahu also invited Putin to Israel in May for the unveiling of a monument to the defenders of Leningrad (modern day St. Petersburg) during World War II.

This time, the conventional wisdom in Moscow had it that Netanyahu wouldn’t have traveled to Russia five days before his nation's fateful parliamentary elections had he not felt positively about the talks with Putin. With the election stakes rising and the Iranian presence in Syria apparently becoming an even bigger of a worry for Israel, Netanyahu’s three-part ploy eyed the following: to placate about a million descendants of Russian Jewish immigrants who are now voters in Israel and politically dispersed but mainly support former Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beitenu, to negotiate favorable terms for Israel’s standing in Syria, including countering pro-Iranian forces there, and to reinforce the image of one of a handful international leaders who enjoy good relations with both Trump and Putin and arguably the only one who manipulates both Russia and the United States for the benefit of his country's national security interests. The visit to Moscow may be his second biggest campaign move since his recent trip to Washington. Remarkably, Trump’s recent decision on the Golan Heights was not brought up in public deliberations of in press releases of the Putin-Netanyahu talks.

For Putin, the 13th meeting with his Israeli counterpart since December 2015 had its own significance. As Syria slowly moves into a post-war stage, he outsourced the marshy process of political settlement, return of the refugees and reconstruction to agencies within Foreign and Defense Ministries to personally focus on riskier yet more politically valuable assets: high level mediation of the Israeli-Iranian and Turkish-Syrian conundrums. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey — yet another leader who seeks to play Russia and the United States against each other for the benefit of his country's interests — is expected in Moscow on April 8.