While publicly announcing an end to the latest round of conflict with Iran, the US conducted strikes on Iranian targets in Gilan province on the Caspian Sea, including a Revolutionary Guards Navy headquarters and the key port of Bandar Anzali.

Ukraine simultaneously struck an Iranian commercial vessel in the Caspian Sea (near Russian waters), linking the Ukraine and Iran wars for the first time and signaling the spillover of the conflict into a previously stable Eurasian security zone.

These actions, combined with growing US/NATO influence in the Caucasus (including the “Trump Route” corridor deal), challenge the Russia-Iran security partnership and risk turning the Caspian into a new theater of great-power competition.

On Friday, even as the US President Donald Trump was announcing the end of the latest round of the conflict with Iran, Pentagon unobtrusively extended the war theatre to the Caspian Sea in a hugely consequential geopolitical thrust. The incident hardly figured in the western news cycle.

But CGTN, perhaps sensing that the US could be stealthily spreading its war to the Caspian region, reported on July 25, “US missiles struck a Revolutionary Guards Navy headquarters in the Ziba Kenar area of the Caspian Sea province of Gilan, according to a security official in Gilan quoted by Iranian media. Provincial authorities said US projectiles had also struck the port city of Bandar Anzali, according to the Iranian Labor News Agency.” 

Gilan province, which has a Caspian coastline borders Azerbaijan in the west, with which Iran has had a troubled relationship in the recent years following the Transcaucasian region’s geopolitical gravitation towards the western orbit. Unsurprisingly, Russia’s ties with Azerbaijan and Armenia also has suffered a severe erosion following the ascendance of US (and Nato) influence in Transcaucasia. 

Trump is the new sheriff in town in Baku and Yerevan with........

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