1
RESCUING AND REARMING THE USSR’S ALLIES
IN JUNE 1967
Now Nasser is flagellating himself, but we are not feeling any better.
Leonid Brezhnev^1A. Fighting back: Soviet perception of June 1967 as a replay of June 1941
The pattern for future Soviet military involvement in Eg ypt was set even before the
end of the Six-Day War. Subsequent chapters of this book will address the question
of when and how the USSR’s deployment of regular military formations in Eg ypt
(Operation Kavkaz) was determined and began. But a detailed review of Soviet
moves in June–July 1967 shows that commitment of various Soviet units actually
occurred at this stage, to meet tactical as well as political demands that the war’s
results created. Moreover, the types of Soviet forces involved mostly correspond with
those that had already been allotted for the intervention that Moscow had planned
to exercise in the Six-Day War itself.
We described in Foxbats how the unexpected devastation of the Eg yptian Air
Force (EAF)’s craft and bases by Israel’s preemptive strike on 5 June 1967 not only
doomed the Eg yptian army in Sinai. It also obviated most of the original Soviet plan
to intervene directly in favor of an Arab counteroffensive once Israel had been pro-
voked into an “aggressive” preemption. This setback delayed and redefined the assign-
ments that Soviet units were tasked to perform but did not require new approval at
the Politburo level. When such authorization did become necessary for a major
expansion of the Soviet combat presence, both precedents and experience had been
created, and expanding on them was already a matter of degree rather than principle.
Among various dates that are given in post-Soviet sources for the onset of Kavkaz,
the earliest is in late 1968.^2 But the operation’s origin can be traced as far back as the
initial Soviet–Eg yptian war planning in mid-1966, and certainly to the plan’s partial
implementation in June–July 1967.