For Putin, Iran Is Something Close to Irreplaceable |
For Putin, Iran Is Something Close to Irreplaceable
Ms. Grajewski is the author of the forthcoming “Russia and Iran: Partners in Defiance From Syria to Ukraine.” She wrote from Paris.
The misfortune of an adversary can often seem like a boon, and in recent weeks, Moscow has certainly appeared to be a beneficiary of the United States’ miring itself in a war in Iran. Oil prices have risen markedly, some sanctions on Russian and Iranian oil have been temporarily waived, and Western attention has fractured. Russia’s coffers have been refilling, and Russia-Ukraine peace talks with the United States are paused because “the Americans have a lot of other things to deal with, if you know what I mean,” as Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, reportedly told Russian state media this week.
Iran has held on for weeks, generating enormous costs to the global economy as it did so, until a limited cease-fire was announced on Tuesday night. The Iranian authorities may be trumpeting this fragile cease-fire as a strategic victory, but even if it holds, the country is thoroughly battered, poorer and more isolated. If it collapses and the war resumes, the cumulative weight of military strikes, sanctions and internal unrest could tip Iran toward fragmentation or implosion.
Both of these outcomes should be — and probably are — giving President Vladimir Putin of Russia pause. Iran is a Russian partner that, even before this war, has generated costs for America without requiring Russian exposure. From the Kremlin’s perspective, it is something close to irreplaceable.
When Iranian long-range Shahed drones first appeared over Ukrainian cities in 2022, they seemed to represent a new phase of the relationship between Russia and Iran. For decades, Tehran had seen Moscow less as a trusted partner and more as a cynical great power that would, as it did in 2010, back U.N. sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program if that suited Russian interests. But habits of cooperation that were built and refined over the course of the war in Syria, from around 2015, had evolved, by the time Russia invaded Ukraine, into a partnership.
The regimes are bound by the same grievance: the conviction that the U.S.-led international order is designed to contain them. This shared belief has generated cooperation across intelligence, finance and an elaborate sanctions-evasion architecture. Iran has integrated lessons from the war in Ukraine — drone saturation, electronic warfare, the vulnerabilities of armored columns — into its own military operations. Russia has observed how Iran sustains irregular warfare across multiple theaters simultaneously, projecting force through proxies and preserving plausible deniability.
In January 2025, the two signed a partnership agreement that ratified much of their cooperation. The treaty contains no mutual defense clause. Moscow has never promised to fight the United States on Iran’s behalf, or vice versa. The point was for each to ensure that the other had what it needed to fight longer on its own.
Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.