Russia-Iran Ties Are Being Strained by Parallel Conflicts
As Iran ponders strike on Israel and Ukraine penetrates Russian border, Moscow and Tehran weigh how much they can help each other
By Yaroslav Trofimov Aug. 13, 2024 The Wall Street Journal
DUBAI—The parallel escalations in the Middle East and in the Russian war with Ukraine are creating fresh challenges for the budding partnership between Iran and Russia, two nations that have grown increasingly close because of their shared hostility to the U.S.
Russia and Iran can fill gaps in each other’s intelligence and military capabilities—Russia makes sophisticated air defenses and aircraft, while Iran has developed powerful drones and missiles—as they confront foes in their own regions.
Iran has said it will mount a forceful retaliation against Israel for the July 31 killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Russia, surprised by the Ukrainian invasion of its Kursk region, is scrambling to respond as Kyiv readies its first F-16 aircraft and moves to destroy Russian air defenses.
This convergence of events means that each country has little spare capacity to offer the weapons that the other needs most—at least for now.
“Iran risks that what it had conceived as a contained military action against Israel turns into an all-out war,” said Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. “If that happens, Iran needs every missile that it has—in the same way that Russia needs every missile defense system that it has.”
From Moscow’s perspective, diplomats and intelligence officials say, the calculation is simple: a major Middle East war would hamper its own war effort and complicate relations with nations that allow Russia to mitigate the effect of Western sanctions, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
After centuries of conflict and ideological differences, a partnership between Moscow and Tehran coalesced a decade ago, as Russian President Vladimir Putin turned away from the West after his initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
At the time, Russia and Iran successfully joined hands in Syria to prevent the collapse of President Bashar al-Assad, who was losing control to a U.S.-supported insurgency.
Russian setbacks in Ukraine after the February 2022 invasion changed the balance of power in its relationship with Iran. The country’s aura of military prowess was punctured and its economy was subjected to international sanctions that, in some ways, exceed those that Iran has faced for decades.
All of a sudden, Moscow went from being an undisputed senior partner to a needy nation desperate for military assistance from Tehran.
“For the first time in the postrevolution history of the Islamic Republic, Russia is actually dependent on Iran for something crucial, which is weapons,” said Meir Javedanfar, Iran lecturer at Reichman University in Israel. “After the recent defeats in Kursk, Russia needs Iranian support more than ever.”
Iran started supplying Russia with thousands of Shahed attack drones, artillery ammunition and some of its Mohajer drones that can fire missiles in the fall of 2022, after a Putin visit to Tehran. The assembly of the Shaheds has since been localized in the Tatarstan region of Russia.
So far, however, Iran has rebuffed Russian requests for ballistic missiles, of which it is believed to possess thousands. A senior Western official described the potential supply of several hundred such missiles to Russia as a “game changer” in Ukraine—saying that Iranian stocks exceed the number of costly interceptors Kyiv can obtain.
Russia has already fired thousands of ballistic and cruise missiles at Ukraine, depleting its own reserves, and recently started using ballistic missiles provided by North Korea, another member of the new axis of anti-Western autocracies.
The U.S. State Department this week warned Iran of “a swift and severe response” by Washington and its allies should the Iranian missiles be provided to Russia.
Retribution, according to European officials, could include a ban on Iranian civilian flights to European nations—not necessarily something that would ultimately deter Tehran, they acknowledge. Russian airlines have already been banned from European and U.S. airspace since 2022, as part of the sanctions imposed for the invasion.
“Western powers have made it clear to Tehran that the transfer of ballistic missiles to Russia would burn any remaining diplomatic bridges over sanctions easing,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Tehran, she added, is unlikely to push these red lines until it establishes what Iran policy will be adopted by the next U.S. administration.
Western governments also have growing concerns about a potential shift in Russia’s willingness to share nuclear-weapons technology. So far, the U.S. government says, it has seen no indication that Putin has changed Moscow’s longstanding policy to oppose an Iranian nuclear breakthrough. But the policy—once a consensus—is now the subject of discussion in Moscow’s security establishment, some of it behind closed doors and some in the open.
Sergey Karaganov, honorary chair of Russia’s Foreign and Defense Policy Council advisory group, who moderated Putin’s talk at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June, wrote in an article published in February that “sooner or later we must change Russia’s official policy when it comes to nuclear non-proliferation” because it is unfair to many non-Western countries. Iran, he added, should be able to have a nuclear deterrent if it renounced its stated aspiration to exterminate Israel.
Western officials say that the key area of concern, should decision makers in Moscow decide to assist Iran’s nuclear weaponization, would be unofficial knowledge-sharing by Russian scientists that is hard to detect. “Imagine a few Russian nuclear scientists go to Iran on a long vacation, and just fill the knowledge gaps,” one European official said. “That’s what we fear.”
When it comes to conventional weapons, Iran’s weakest spots are its rudimentary air defenses and outdated combat aircraft—areas where Russia has long promised to help. However, the sale of Su-35 multirole fighters announced years ago has yet to be completed, with the aircraft still sitting in Siberia and Western intelligence officials wondering about the reasons for the delay.
Iran received S-300 missile defense systems from Russia in 2016, nearly a decade after first agreeing to the deal, which Moscow canceled at one point. The S-300 system, however, seemed to be inefficient against a pinpoint Israeli strike in April, with satellite images indicating damage to a key component.
Contacts about shipping to Iran the more powerful S-400 air defense systems so far have led to no known agreements.
With Ukraine launching increasingly frequent drone and missile attacks on military and infrastructure targets in Russia and occupied parts of Ukraine, including military airfields, Moscow is unable to protect its own territory with sufficient air defenses. Several S-400 batteries have been destroyed in recent months.
These constraints point to the fundamental issue of the Russo-Iranian partnership. While Moscow and Tehran increasingly bond over their enmity to the U.S., they don’t publicly support each other’s war goals against their regional enemies.
While Iran seeks the eradication of Israel, Moscow maintains full relations with it, including visa-free travel for each other’s citizens and daily direct flights that continue even as air carriers from the U.S. suspended their links with Tel Aviv. Russia is also cultivating relations with Iran’s Arab rivals, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E.
Iran, meanwhile, has never formally acknowledged that it is supplying weapons to Russia, and—unlike North Korea, Belarus or Syria—abstained rather than siding with Moscow in United Nations General Assembly votes condemning the invasion of Ukraine.
“Russia and Iran have distinctive ideologies, competitive national interests and centuries of mutual mistrust,” said Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They cooperate when it suits their defiance of the U.S.-led world order, but neither will risk their hold on power by fully committing to each other’s cause.”
Mutual suspicion remains. In May, after the helicopter crash that killed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, both seen as advocates of closer cooperation with Moscow, Russian military analysts speculated that the incident might have been orchestrated by elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who seek eventual rapprochement with the West.
The July election of President Masoud Pezeshkian, who campaigned on promises of better ties with Europe and lowering tensions with the U.S. to revive the country’s struggling economy, only solidified such fears. Iran’s establishment, meanwhile, fears Moscow would betray Iran if it is able to find an accommodation with the U.S. over Ukraine, especially if former President Donald Trump wins re-election.
The increasingly systemic nature of Russia’s—and Iran’s—conflict with the U.S. and the West, however, brings the two regimes closer together despite such suspicions, said Hanna Notte, director for Eurasia at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif.
“There have been grievances in the past,” she said. “But the historical mistrust factor is by far outweighed today by having a common purpose and a common enemy in the United States and the West—and in seeing each other as partners in this global confrontation with the West.”
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com