Russia Steps Up Iran Aid To Salvage Damaged Repute Despite US Ukraine Risk

This past week, one of the US Air Force's valuable and strategically critical AWACs electronic early warning planes was destroyed by an Iranian missile while stationed at a Saudi air base. The targeting information on the plane is widely reported to have been provided to Iran by Russia. 

This incident is one of many recently in which Russia has directly confronted the US despite the Kremlin's desire to keep Trump on its side in support of its invasion of Ukraine. The reason for the change appears to be a desire to salvage what is left of its damaged reputation as a global power since the US has aggressively attacked countries in its network of alliances. The Russian diplomatic calculus is changing as its war in Ukraine has largely faltered and it looks beyond that to its broader standing in the world. It may still hope to keep Trump's tacit support, given his shared interest in authoritarian rule, but it may also be determining that the challenge to its standing is too severe and must be aggressively addressed, no matter the short-term regional impact. JL

Thomas Grove reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Russia has stepped up its support for Iran, its closest partner in the Middle East, providing satellite imagery and drone technology to help Iran target U.S. forces. Moscow is trying to salvage what’s left of its shrinking web of partnerships that once made it the world’s second-largest arms exporter behind the U.S., and a backer of dictatorships from the Middle East to Latin America. Earlier in Trump’s second term, Russia appeared reluctant to confront the U.S. directly as it tried to keep the Trump administration largely on the sidelines of the war in Ukraine (but) the increasing conflict between Trump’s expansive foreign policy and the Kremlin’s own footholds across the globe has triggered calls inside Russia to deal with the U.S. more aggressively. 

Russia has emerged as one of the early winners in the Iran war, as surging oil prices have given its slumping economy a boost and the Trump administration has eased restrictions on Russian oil. But over the longer term, the conflict poses a much bigger threat to its global ambitions.

In recent weeks, Russia has stepped up its support for Iran, its closest partner in the Middle East, providing satellite imagery and drone technology to help Iran target U.S. forces in the region.

Moscow is in part trying to salvage what’s left of its shrinking web of partnerships that once made it the world’s second-largest arms exporter behind the U.S., a backer of dictatorships from the Middle East to Latin America and lent credibility to President Vladimir Putin’s view of Russia as a great power.

Russia is “learning what it means when the United States acts completely unrestrained,” said Hanna Notte, director for Eurasia at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

In January, U.S. forces swept into Venezuela and grabbed President Nicolás Maduro, asserting American dominance over a country that had been a reliable buyer of Russian arms and a destination for hundreds of millions of dollars in Russian investments in its oil sector. President Trump has suggested that toppling the Cuban regime, one of Russia’s closest partners in the Western Hemisphere, might be next on his list.

The attack on Iran poses a threat to Moscow’s long-held strategy of maintaining a partnership of friendly countries and paramilitary groups on its southern flank. Its onetime partner in Syria, former President Bashar al-Assad, is sitting in Moscow after fleeing his country. Russia is now negotiating with the new Syrian government over the future of its military bases there.

The Iranian regime is the linchpin in a network of militias, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which serve as the main challenge to U.S. and Israeli dominance in the region. Those militias, already weakened by the conflicts that followed the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, provide trafficking routes for weapons and technology for Russia’s military.

Iran, although battered by weeks of U.S. and Israeli strikes, has so far proven resilient. It has effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil once flowed, and has kept up daily missile and drone attacks on the U.S. and its allies.

Residents and emergency workers at a Tehran residential building hit in an airstrike. Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

Russia has been advising the Iranians based on its experience in the war in Ukraine, giving them tactical guidance on how many drones should be used in strikes and from which altitudes they should strike, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Russia’s advice and targeting information is believed to have aided Iran in strikes on U.S. radar systems in the region.

The potential survival of the Iranian regime would give Russia a chance to maintain a toehold in the Middle East, one that is all the more important as it sees its influence fading elsewhere. It would also give Moscow a chance to show it is capable of helping its partners fend off American military might.

In addition, Moscow has sought to use its support for Iran as a bargaining chip with Washington. The Kremlin’s envoy for negotiations on Ukraine told the U.S. special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner that Russia would stop providing targeting information for Iran if the U.S. did the same with Ukraine.

Earlier in Trump’s second term, Russia appeared reluctant to confront the U.S. directly as it tried to keep the Trump administration largely on the sidelines of the war in Ukraine. But Moscow has increasingly expressed frustration as its interests have been bulldozed by Trump’s foreign policies. 

U.S. forces have boarded and seized several oil tankers linked to Russia, including one that an American official said was to be escorted by a Russian submarine and other naval assets. The seizure of that tanker, now known as the Marinera, which had a painted Russian flag on its side as it was pursued, occurred despite the warning of the Russian Foreign Ministry to let it travel freely.

A U.S. Coast Guard vessel and the oil tanker Marinera off the coast of Scotland in January. Russell Cheyne/Reuters

Late last year, the Russian state-owned oil company Roszarubezhneft received a 15-year extension on its Venezuelan production. But last month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said his country’s companies were slowly being squeezed out of Venezuela at the behest of the U.S.

“They’re openly trying to get us, our companies out of Venezuela,” he said in an interview with Russian state TV network RT.

On the heels of Trump’s intervention in South America, the U.S. has intensified an embargo on Cuba. In a sign of Moscow’s possible agitation, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia is ready to provide financial and humanitarian aid to alleviate the crisis. A Russian-flagged, state-owned tanker, the Anatoly Kolodkin, has been sailing toward Cuba, prompting speculation over whether the tanker could try to break the embargo.

Farther afield, in a band of landlocked military regimes along the southern end of the Sahara—Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger—Russian mercenaries and military aid have proven unable to hold back jihadist groups that have encircled Mali’s capital and expelled Burkina Faso’s military from much of the countryside.

The foreign ministers of Niger, Mali, Russia and Burkina Faso at an April 2025 news conference in Moscow. Pavel Bednyakov/Press Pool

Russia has mostly stood back as military rulers in Mali and Niger quietly reactivated contact with the Trump administration, which has discussed security assistance. In 2024, Putin promised “total support” to his African allies. In the nearly two years since, Burkina Faso and Mali have lost ground.

Trump has even trod into regions that have historically fallen under Russia’s sphere of influence. Last year he invited Armenian President Nikol Pashinyan and Azeri President Ilham Aliyev to the White House, where he tried to resolve tensions between the former Soviet republics, which have fought several conflicts over disputed territory on their shared border since the fall of the U.S.S.R.

In 2023, Azerbaijan started an offensive that took control of the Nagorno-Karabakh territory back from an ethnic Armenian government, while Russian peacekeepers didn’t intervene.

The White House talks, in which Trump showed off his collection of hats to the leaders, was one of the first attempts by a U.S. president to wade into the thorny issues of the region.

“When it comes to the South Caucasus, it almost seems like Trump is deliberately tweaking the Russians,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at Rand, a defense think tank. 

The increasing conflict between Trump’s expansive foreign policy and the Kremlin’s own footholds across the globe has triggered calls inside Russia to deal with the U.S. more aggressively. 

“If real patriotic reforms aren’t enacted now in Russia, then the situation will become more unpredictable,” said Alexander Dugin, a Russian nationalist who has advocated for a hard turn against the West that has been embraced by Putin. “One by one, our partners will simply fall.”