Why Russia Is Watching Iran Burn |
Last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty, committing their countries to oppose interference by third parties in each other’s internal and external affairs. Moscow and Tehran celebrated the treaty as the culmination of growing ties between the two regimes.
Yet when the United States and Israel launched an attack on Iran in late February—the second in just eight months, following last summer’s 12-day war—Russia mostly stood idly by. Putin called the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei a “cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law,” and Russia’s foreign ministry called for “immediate de-escalation, cessation of hostilities, and resumption of political and diplomatic processes,” but neither statement mentioned U.S. President Donald Trump or raised the possibility of Russia coming to Iran’s defense.
Moscow may have remained true to the letter of the treaty, which doesn’t include a mutual defense clause, but it didn’t do much of substance to aid a key partner in the Middle East and an important accomplice in Putin’s war against Ukraine. The Washington Post and CNN have reported that Russia may have helped Iran with targeting data and advanced drone tactics, but such limited assistance is not likely to make a meaningful difference.
The Kremlin’s impotence in Iran is in keeping with a familiar pattern: when Russia’s friends are in need, Moscow issues strongly worded statements and does little else. In late 2023, Russia failed to intervene in a brief war between its treaty ally, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, allowing Baku to reclaim control over its province of Nagorno-Karabakh. A year later, Moscow let rebel forces topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. Within the past year, the United States (along with Israel) bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, military bases, and missile factories; killed high-ranking Iranian officials, military commanders, and nuclear scientists; and abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Moscow’s key partner in Latin America, with virtually no Russian interference. All these cases lay bare the limitations of Russia’s power to shape outcomes around the world.
And yet the current war in Iran has unintended consequences that benefit Russia. As the war drags on, the price of energy will likely continue to rise, which will help Moscow earn additional revenue and address a ballooning budget deficit resulting from its war in Ukraine. On Thursday, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that in an effort to slow climbing prices, it was temporarily lifting sanctions on Russian oil already at sea. Meanwhile, China, concerned about the long-term stability of energy supplies from the Middle East, may discover an even greater need for Russian oil and gas. And, of course, the war in Iran is yet another distraction for the United States, diverting precious resources and bandwidth that Washington might otherwise have allocated to its European partners and Ukraine. Russia may be unable to protect its partners, but it is still skillful in adapting to strategic failures and reaping important tactical gains from them.
A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow and Tehran saw mutual advantage in developing a partnership. For several hundred years until that point, they were mainly rivals, vying for territory in the Caucasus region and around the Caspian Sea. But in the early 1990s, Moscow sought to sell its surplus Soviet-era defense and civilian nuclear technologies, and Iran, devastated by its war with Iraq and isolated by Western sanctions, proved a ready buyer.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Russia delivered systems that remain core components of Iran’s military inventory: MiG-29 fighters, Su-24 strike aircraft, Kilo-class diesel submarines, T-72 tanks, and S-200 air defense systems. Eventually, Russia sent Tor-M1 short-range air defense batteries and the S-300 long-range surface-to-air missile system. These transfers mattered to Iran, but they never constituted alliance-level military integration. Russian arms deliveries were episodic and constrained by Western sanctions, and they did not include the most powerful systems, such as the S-400 air defense system, or the most advanced fighter jets.
Moreover, even as it sold air defenses and helicopters to Tehran, Russia maintained parallel security relationships with Egypt, Israel, and the Gulf states—all competitors or adversaries of Iran. Iranian officials were not blind to this, and the resentment it generated ran deep. In 2010, Moscow, bending to Western pressure, suspended deliveries of the S-300 defense system to Iran and acquiesced to UN sanctions that it privately opposed. At a time when Moscow still wished to be seen as a responsible permanent member of the UN Security Council and a valuable partner to the United States, the Russian leadership treated Iran less as a partner than as a pawn to be leveraged in negotiations with Washington and Brussels.
Since the early 2000s, Russia and Iran have tried to cooperate in the oil and gas sector—the backbone of their two economies—but with little success. Russian oil companies looked at some opportunities for exploration and production in Iran, but no deals were concluded. The Russian state oil company Gazprom contemplated participating in the development of a vast natural gas field in the Persian Gulf, but the commercial terms were unattractive. Overall trade volumes between the two countries also remained low during this time, hovering between $1 billion and $3 billion a year, with Moscow mostly selling grain and nuclear fuel to Iran and Tehran exporting mostly fruits, vegetables, and nuts to Russia.
In 2015, the civil war in Syria brought Russia and Iran into a tactical alliance to prop up the Assad regime. Moscow provided air support, and Tehran reinforced the pro-regime forces’ land component by sending military advisers and encouraging Hezbollah, the Tehran-backed Shiite militia in Lebanon, to join the fight on Assad’s behalf. But it wasn’t until Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that the relationship between Moscow and Tehran evolved into a much closer, more balanced partnership.
After February 2022, the Kremlin sought three main things from its external partners: a willingness and capacity to support its military campaign against Kyiv, help in evading sanctions and sustaining Russia’s embattled economy, and the ability to use instruments of pressure and revenge against the Western coalition supporting Ukraine. Iran checked all three boxes to varying degrees and thus became Russia’s main partner in the Middle East. Moscow’s tilt toward Iran negatively affected its ties with Israel, which started to share some military technology with Ukraine, but the Kremlin decided the partnership with Tehran was worth the cost.
The war in Ukraine inverted the logic of the Iranian-Russian security relationship. For the first time, Iran became a net supplier of arms to Russia. Its most consequential early contribution was the Shahed series of loitering munitions, which Russian forces began deploying in the autumn of 2022 to supplement its dwindling precision-missile stocks. Moscow moved quickly to localize production of the Shahed, redesigning internal components to accommodate domestic supply chains and sanctions-constrained electronics and scaling output well beyond what Iran had originally supplied.
In return, according to media reports, Russia provided Iran with new military hardware, including several Yak-130 trainer jets and Mi-28 attack helicopters, dozens of Spartak armored vehicles, and small arms. Iran inked contracts to buy Su-35 fighter jets and portable air defense systems, but their delivery status is unclear. The most consequential area of security cooperation is likely space; Russian launch infrastructure and orbital expertise were critical to Iranian ballistic missile development. In 2023, then CIA Director William Burns warned that Russian technicians were working directly on Iran’s space launch vehicle program and broader missile development efforts.
Iran also helped the Russian economy withstand Western sanctions. Over the last decade, Tehran became a trailblazer in creating the infrastructure for evading sanctions in the oil trade. In the 2010s, Iran developed a “shadow fleet,” a network of tankers carrying sanctioned oil, to expedite Iranian oil exports, along with auxiliary services to handle insurance, money transfers, and other aspects of oil transportation and sales by a sanctioned country. Beginning in 2022, Russia adopted these Iranian practices, relying on the same infrastructure in the Gulf states. Moscow has since taken this illicit trade to new heights, exporting much higher volumes than Iran was ever able to. On the one hand, Russia’s adoption of Iranian sanctions-busting methods benefited Iran by increasing the overall number of shadow fleet tankers and thereby reducing the costs for a country to field any such ships. But on the other, Russia became a competitor by selling its oil predominantly to China and India, the same buyers that Iran was targeting.
Nevertheless, trade between Russia and Iran has more than doubled since the start of the war in Ukraine, from around $2 billion a year to close to $5 billion today. Moscow has also helped Iran in other ways. In 2023, the Kremlin made the final push to make Iran a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The following year, Moscow lobbied for Tehran’s inclusion in the expanded BRICS, whose original members were Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. And last May, Russia orchestrated the signing of a free-trade agreement between Iran and the Eurasian Economic Union, which comprises Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia. The Kremlin has also shown a willingness to engage with some Iranian proxies, particularly the Houthis, by providing them with training and weapons.
But even as the relationship between Tehran and Moscow has deepened, the limits of Putin’s influence and ability to protect his partners are on full display. Russia has what Iran most wants in a major conflict with Israel and the United States: advanced fighters, air defense systems, and precision munitions, which Russia produces in large numbers. But these are all assets that Russia needs for its own war in Ukraine. Even if Moscow wanted to deliver these systems to Iran, it wouldn’t be able to do so fast enough. The training alone of Iranian operators on an S-400 air defense system, for example, would take around six to eight months.
With its military consumed by the war in Ukraine and no appetite to get in the way of a resolute U.S.-Israeli attack, Moscow has offered Tehran little visible assistance beyond diplomatic condemnation and calls for restraint. Also holding Moscow back are the Kremlin’s ongoing negotiations with the Trump administration to end the war in Ukraine. The Russian leadership hopes to reap benefits from this performative process, at least in terms of limiting U.S. support for Ukraine and slowing the rollout of new sanctions targeting Russia. Under these circumstances, the Kremlin can’t afford to provide stronger, more visible support for Iran. Moscow’s commitment to Tehran is also tempered by its needs to balance its relationships in the region. The Gulf countries now facing Iranian attacks are important Russian partners in their own right—especially the United Arab Emirates, which serves as a logistical and financial hub for Russian interests, and Saudi Arabia, which is the Kremlin’s key partner in OPEC+.
To be sure, Russia may well be providing assistance that is harder to observe than a weapons shipment, such as offering access to space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance that could improve Iranian targeting. Such assistance leaves fewer visible traces than transfers of aircraft or missile batteries, which makes it harder to track and easier to deny, but it is still consequential. Some U.S. administration officials have concluded that Moscow is clandestinely engaged in these activities, as The Washington Post recently reported. The exact scale and depth of this effort is difficult to estimate at this point, but its impact surely pales in comparison to the multiyear, U.S.-led intelligence assistance program that enabled Ukrainian armed forces to kill thousands of Russian soldiers since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022.
Even as Moscow fails to support Tehran, Russia stands to gain from the unintended consequences and second-order effects of the ongoing war in Iran. The United States is expending air defense interceptors and precision munitions that Ukraine needs. Patriot missiles and long-range strike weapons are finite, and what gets allocated to Israel and the Gulf will be unavailable to Kyiv.
Higher energy prices would make Russian oil and gas indispensable.
An even greater prize to Russia is the rising cost of energy. Oil prices fell in 2025 because of the decision by OPEC+ to increase production. Russia did not have much spare capacity to expand its oil production, so it could not earn on volume what it lost on price. This decision created a surplus in the market and alternatives to Russian oil for buyers, which, coupled with increasing sanctions pressure from the United States, drove steep discounts on Russian oil. Now the shortage created by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is driving up oil prices, giving Russia and its suffering state budget a boost in revenue. Last week, in order to ease pressure on the markets, the U.S. Treasury even issued a 30-day license to enable the sale of Russian crude to India that had previously been sanctioned. The Gulf is also a major supplier of liquified natural gas; dramatically reduced exports from the region helps Russia sell its own liquified natural gas, particularly in Asia.
A few weeks of disruption to the Gulf’s energy supplies might benefit Russia, but not by much; for every $10 increase in the oil barrel price, Russia stands to earn about $95 million dollars a day, not a significant amount in the short run. But if the war were to inflict heavy and lasting damage to the oil and gas infrastructure in the region, that could drive up prices for a considerable period of time and help fill the Kremlin’s coffers. So far, the United States and Israel have held back from damaging Iran’s oil export potential and bombing Iranian oil fields and terminals, but that could change in the course of the conflict. Should a desperate Iran seek to cause as much pain to its neighbors and the global economy as possible, the effects on world oil and gas supplies might be more enduring.
Significant and lasting damage to the Gulf’s energy infrastructure, coupled with a potentially long period of instability in the Middle East, could finally persuade China to launch new overland oil and gas pipelines from Russia. This is something that Putin has been trying to persuade Chinese President Xi Jinping to do for the last decade, especially since 2022, when Europe started to wind down its energy dependence on Russia. Higher energy prices would also make Russian oil and gas indispensable. European and U.S. policymakers would then face a tough choice: continue tightening sanctions pressure on Russia at a mounting economic cost or soften their stance.
Russia’s own choices are less complicated. The Kremlin’s recent failures to help its partners—in Syria, Venezuela, and Iran—have laid bare the limitations of its reach as a global power. With its resources tied down in Ukraine, Moscow can be of little material help to its authoritarian friends. What remains is a narrower objective: cash in on the unintended consequences of U.S. interventionism.
You are reading a free article
Subscribe to Foreign Affairs to get unlimited access.
Paywall-free reading of new articles and over a century of archives
Six issues a year in print and online, plus audio articles
Unlock access to the Foreign Affairs app for reading on the go
Already a subscriber? Sign In