It’s sad that a man died at such a young age and left behind a wife and children, regardless of what one thought of his political opinions or allegiances. So I’m not going to gloat like I’ve seen some critics of the west do. However, it’s not lost on me the utter double standard with which western media and officials are treating Navalny’s death compared to the death of Gonzalo Lira in a Ukrainian prison recently or the imprisonment and consequent ongoing slow death of Julian Assange. The comments of Volodymyr Zelensky are particularly nauseating. – Natylie

Euronews, 2/16/24

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has died in prison, Russian authorities announced on Friday. He was 47.

A statement from the prison service of Yamalo-Nenets, where Navalny was imprisoned, said he “felt unwell after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness.” 

It detailed that medical workers arrived “immediately” and “all necessary resuscitation measures were carried out,” but they did not “yield positive results.”

“Emergency medical doctors confirmed the death of the convict,” the statement added. 

Navalny was a lawyer turned blogger, YouTuber, protest organiser, anti-corruption activist and face of Russia’s opposition. 

The 47-year-old gained notoriety by criticising President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle whom he accused of vast corruption and opulence.

According to a statement cited by Russian state news agency TASS, Putin has been informed of his foes’ demise, though has no additional information about his death. 

Russian government spokesman Dmitry Peskov is also quoted by TASS as saying that the federal prison service is making all necessary checks regarding his death.

‘No confirmation of this yet’

Navalny’s team, however, said that they have not had confirmation of the politician’s death.

“Alexei’s lawyer is now flying to Kharp. As soon as we have information, we will report it,” Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh wrote on X.

Navalny’s chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, described the prison services’ announcement as “a confession that they have killed” him, cautioning however that they have not yet had confirmation. 

Russian newspaper editor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov told Reuters on Friday that the opposition figure’s death was “murder”, claiming that harsh treatment had caused his demise.

“My sincere belief is that it was the conditions of detention that led to Navalny’s death … His sentence was supplemented by murder,” Muratov said, offering condolences to his family.

Navalny was arrested in 2021 upon his return to Russia from Germany where he had been treated for a suspected assassination attempt by poison. He was immediately incarcerated and sentenced to 19 years in a penal colony on charges of extremism.

Navalny had initially been serving his sentence in the Vladimir region of central Russia, about 230 kilometres east of Moscow. 

But he was transferred late last year to a “special regime” penal colony – the highest security level of prisons in Russia – above the Arctic Circle.

‘Killed by the Kremlin’s brutality’

Leaders around the world have condemned his death. 

Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy said it was “obvious” Putin was behind Navalny’s death, during a meeting in Berlin with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Zelenskyy said the Russian president does not care who dies so long as his position as the head of the state is secure. 

“Whatever story they tell, let us be clear: Russia is responsible,” said US Vice President Kamala Harris at the Munich Security Conference.

Writing on X, UK foreign secretary and former Prime Minister David Cameron said Putin should be held accountable for what had happened. 

“Navalny fought bravely against corruption. Putin’s Russia fabricated charges against him, poisoned him, sent him to an arctic penal colony & now he has tragically died,” Cameron added.

Several EU leaders also pinned responsibility directly on Putin’s Russia.

“This terrible news shows once again how Russia has changed and what kind of regime is in power in Moscow,” said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

French President Emmanuel Macron added: “In today’s Russia, free spirits are sent to the Gulag and condemned to death. Anger and indignation.”

Condemnation and condolences also flooded in from the Belgian, Czech, Dutch, Polish, Spanish and Swedish capitals, as well as from Russia’s neighbouring Baltic countries.

Alexei Navalny had a few health scares since he voluntarily returned from Germany to Russia in 2021.

He had been treated in Germany for what tests showed as nerve agent poisoning, with Navalny saying at the time he was poisoned in Siberia in 2020. 

The Kremlin denied trying to kill him. 

In 2011, Navalny was asked by Reuters if he feared whether Putin would come after him. 

“That’s the difference between me and you: you are afraid and I am not afraid,” he said. “I realise there is danger, but why should I be afraid?”

Scores of Kremlin critics, journalists and turncoat spies have died over the years in suspect circumstances. 

Attacks range from the exotic — poisoned by drinking polonium-laced tea or touching a deadly nerve agent — to the more mundane of getting shot at close range.

Read Racist or Revolutionary: The Complex Legacy of Alexey Navalny here.

***

RT, 2/16/24

Jailed Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny has died, the prison service of the Yamalo-Nenets Region, where he had been serving his sentence, reported on Friday afternoon.

The 47-year-old began to feel unwell after a walk, and lost consciousness, according to a statement. Russian media outlets have indicated that doctors pronounced Navalny dead after 2pm local time.

“All the necessary resuscitation measures were carried out, but they failed to achieve a positive result,” the authorities outlined.

The cause of death is being established. However, according to an RT Russian service source, the opposition figure had a blood clot.

Navalny was jailed in early 2021, over a long-standing fraud case involving French retailer Yves Rocher. The previous summer he attracted major international attention after an alleged poisoning in Siberia, which led to his transfer to Germany. Upon returning, he was sentenced to the first of several prison terms.

Initially, he was placed in a high-security facility in Vladimir Region. In 2023 he was sentenced to 19 years “special regime” for “extremism.” Late last year he was transferred to the ‘Polar Wolf’ colony in Yamalo-Nenets, located 40km above the Arctic Circle. 

The Kremlin said that President Vladimir Putin has been informed of Navalny’s death. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov referred questions to the Federal Penitentiary Service, adding that the cause was currently unclear.

Navalny’s lawyer, Leonid Solovyov refused to comment, but explained that his client had held a meeting on Wednesday. “Everything was normal then,” he insisted. 

Navalny joined a court session via videolink on Thursday, TASS reported, citing the court press service.

A former Russian nationalist activist, Navalny first came to attention as one of the leaders of the “Russian march,” a far-right rally previously held annually. He subsequently took a prominent role in the liberal-driven 2011-12 protests in Russia, which centered on Moscow’s Bolotnaya square. In 2013, he won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral election.

Later, he established a broader movement – which produced reports on alleged corruption – and attempted to take part in the 2018 presidential contest.

Navalny, a native of Moscow, was married, with two children.

By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 2/13/24

Amongst the condemnations that were hurled at Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin even before their interview was aired, was this gem from an unnamed European foreign affairs spokesman to The Guardian: 

“A spokesperson for the European Commission said it anticipated that the interview would provide a platform for Putin’s ‘twisted desire to reinstate’ the Russian empire.

‘We can all assume what Putin might say. I mean he is a chronic liar,’ said the EU’s spokesperson for foreign affairs. …

‘[Putin] is trying to kill as many Ukrainians as he can for no reason. There is only one reason for his twisted desire to reinstate the now imperialistic Russian empire where he controls everything in his neighbourhood and imposes his will. But this is not something we are able to tolerate or are willing to tolerate in Europe or the world in the 21st century.’” [Emphasis added.]

The article warned that Carlson’s interview could actually be deemed “illegal” under last year’s European Digital Services Act.  The Guardian says:

“The law is aimed at stamping out illegal content or harmful content that incites violence or hate speech from social media. All the large platforms, bar X, have signed up to a code of conduct to help them accelerate and build their internal procedures in order to comply with the law. …

The onus is on platforms to ensure content is lawful, said a spokesperson for the digital tsar, Thierry Breton. … If a social media platform does not comply with the new EU law it can be sanctioned with a hefty fine, or banned from operating in the EU.”

The Russians Are Coming … Again

Military parade on Moscow’s Red Square, May 2017. (kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

After the interview, the Western media predictably dismissed it for a variety of reasons, including that it promoted Russian “imperialism.”  The Economist wrote that Putin’s

“obsession — Russia’s historical claim to Ukraine — is backed by a nuclear arsenal. … He denied any interest in invading Poland or Latvia (though he previously said the same about Ukraine).”  

Western rhetoric about a resurgent “Russian imperialism” dates back to 2014, when Russia assisted Donbass in resisting the U.S.-backed unconstitutional change of government in Kiev. Western officials sought to characterize Russia’s action as an “invasion” that was part of a grand scheme by Putin to reconstitute the Soviet Empire and even threaten Western Europe. 

In March 2014, a month after the coup without making any reference to it to explain Russian actions, Hillary Clinton compared Putin to Adolf Hitler.  The Washington Post reported:

“‘Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the ’30s,’ Clinton said Tuesday, according to the Long Beach Press-Telegram. ‘All the Germans that were … the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people, and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.’” 

March 19, 2010: U.S. Secretary of State Clinton, Ambassador Beyrle and Under Secretary Burns with Russian Prime Minister Putin during a meeting at the Novo-Ogaryovo just outside Moscow. (State Department, Public Domain)

Clinton later tried to talk down any comparison to Hitler beginning his conquest of Europe by saying Putin was not that irrational. But the notion that the Russian president is trying to reconstruct the Soviet Empire — and then threaten Western Europe — is often repeated in the West. 

The Atlantic Council has been in the forefront of keeping this idea afloat. 

Reconstituting the Soviet Empire would involve bringing the Central Asian Republics, Azerbaijan and Armenia, let alone the Baltics and the former Warsaw States, now part of NATO, under Moscow’s control. 

A slew of articles since Russia’s 2022 invasion have harped on this theme, for example, in The Hill: “The US Has a Chance to Defeat Russian Imperialism for Good;” Foreign Policy: “The Inevitable Fall of Putin’s New Russian Empire;” and Salon: “How Russian Colonialism Took the Western Anti-Imperialist Left for a Ride.”

The absurdity of the notion of a threat to the West by Russian “imperialism” is underscored every time many of these same Western leaders and media ridicule how disastrously Russia has performed on the Ukrainian battlefield and how, in the words of Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission president, Russia must resort to washing machine parts to keep its military going.

How can Russia be so weak and incompetent and yet be such an imminent and menacing threat at the same time? 

The late Russia specialist Stephen F. Cohen dismissed these fears as a dangerous demonization of Russia and Putin. Cohen repeatedly explained that Russia had neither the capacity nor the desire to start a war against NATO and was acting defensively against the alliance.

“How can Russia be so weak and incompetent and yet be such an imminent and menacing threat at the same time?” 

This is clear from the decades-long Russian objection to NATO expansion (which Putin raised with Carlson), coming in the 1990s when Wall Street and the U.S. dominated Russia, asset-stripping the formerly state-owned industries and impoverishing the Russian people, while enriching themselves.

It is clear from Russia backing the Minsk Accords, which would have left Donbass as an autonomous part of Ukraine, and not rejoined to Russia.

And it is clear from the treaty proposals to NATO and the United States offered by Russia in December 2021 intended to avert Russian military intervention. The West rebuffed Russia on all three diplomatic initiatives. 

Dec. 7, 2021: U.S. President Joe Biden, on screen during video call with Putin. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

While realists in Washington and Europe increasingly admit Ukraine is losing the war, neocon fantasists, desperate to keep it going, have revived the theme of the Russian threat to the West to counter congressional reluctance to throw away more money and more lives.

Trumped-up fear of Russia has served U.S. ruling circles well for more than 70 years. The first three National Intelligence Estimates of the C.I.A., from 1947 t0 1949, reported no evidence of a Soviet threat, no infrastructure to support a sustained threat, and no evidence of a desire for confrontation with the United States.

“Trumped-up fear of Russia has served U.S. ruling circles well for more than 70 years.”

Despite this, in 1948 a war scare was drummed up to save the U.S. aircraft industry, which had nearly collapsed with the end of the Second World War.

Then came the 1954 bomber gap and 1957 missile gap with the Soviet Union, now accepted as deliberate fictions.  In 1976 then C.IA. Director George H.W. Bush approved a Team B, whose purpose was again to inflate Soviet military strength. 

George Kennan, the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow and America’s foremost expert on the Soviet Union tried to counter such exaggerations, including late in life when he opposed NATO expansion in the 1990s. 

Now we are being asked again to believe another fictional story of a Russian threat to the West in order to save U.S. and European face — and Joe Biden’s presidency. 

It is instead a projection to cover up its own authentic imperialism and the West’s perceived threat to Russia, a big part of what Putin was trying to get across in the Carlson interview. 

Revanchism & Imperialism

The Donbass status referendums in May 2014. (Andrew Butko, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The issue at hand is the fundamental difference between imperialism and revanchism. Western critics purposely or ignorantly confuse the two to serve their interests.

Succinctly, the difference is this:  imperialists take control of a country that does not want them there and resists.  A revanchist wants to absorb former imperial lands where the population is largely the same ethnicity and welcomes the revanchist power to protect them from an outside threat.

Yes, Hitler was being revanchist in his defense of the German-speaking Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. But it was a first step in an imperial design to conquer countries that ultimately resisted him.  Clinton’s effort to roll back her comments to say Putin is not as irrational as Hitler was her attempt to tamp down a suggestion that Putin wanted to conquer Europe as Hitler did. 

“The issue at hand is the fundamental difference between imperialism and revanchism. Western critics purposely or ignorantly confuse the two to serve their interests.”

To call Putin’s move on Ukraine “imperialist” is to say Russia had never conquered those lands before and that he might indeed keep going to conquer lands Russia has never controlled: i.e., Western Europe.

Russian imperialism in Ukraine took place nearly 250 years ago under the reign of Catherine the Great. That was when the Russians defeated the Turks and occupied what came to be known as Novorossiya.  Putin went back further than that to make Russian claims and he has been open about his feeling that those lands and Russia are one.  He spoke at length about it in his interviews with Oliver Stone in 2017.

Despite these revanchist or irredentist positions on Ukraine, Putin did not act on them until 2022. Carlson asked Putin twice why he didn’t move on Ukraine earlier if he held these views and twice Putin evaded the question.  The Western media is saying that Putin is lying about acting to defend the Russian speakers of the Donbass; that he was motivated by territorial expansion.  

Putin was acting both to defend Donbass’ Russian speakers (who were under imminent renewed attack in February 2022) and also saw the opportunity to reunite the old imperial lands with Russia. That opportunity was seen in the Kremlin as a necessity because of the West’s rejection of Moscow’s diplomatic efforts to avoid conflict. 

Given the results of the four regional referendums in 2022, plus the one in Crimea in 2014, it is clear the people of those regions wanted to rejoin Russia after the coup and the revival of Ukrainian extremism.  

One can condemn or criticize revanchism, but one cannot call it imperialism. 

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe

By Tarik Cyril Amar, RT, 1/26/24

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has caused a stir. But this time not by haranguing the West on how much it owes Ukraine (in short: everything and then some). Or because prominent Ukrainians (former presidential adviser Aleksey Arestovich, for instance) are plausibly accusing Zelensky of missing a real and favorable opportunity for peace with Russia almost two years ago – two long years of devastating war.

Rumors of intrigues surrounding the military leadership of General Valery Zaluzhny – and perhaps even coups – or accusations of authoritarianism leveled by, for example, the mayor of Kiev, Vitaly Klitschko, are not the reason either. By now, that sort of thing is just Kiev background noise.

Instead, this time Zelensky has managed to get attention by issuing a decree ‘On Territories of the Russian Federation Historically Inhabited by Ukrainians’. Much of this fairly short document, which officially came into force on Ukraine’s Unity Day (January 22) is unsurprising. First, there is a rehash of weaponized/nationalized ‘history’ narratives that would make any serious historian blush, painting Russia (including during the Soviet period) as an evil empire that has ‘systematically’ sought to ‘destroy’ Ukrainian national identity for centuries. In Zelensky’s own words, the decree is meant to “restore the truth about the historical past for the sake of the Ukrainian future.”

But the document itself offers not truth but a silly and crude caricature. In reality, modern Ukrainian identity emerged comparatively late, and the Russian-tsarist authorities did try to curtail and restrict it, while the Soviet authorities attempted to shape it by both attacking it and promoting one version of it (as well as fighting alternatives, including a fascist version that allied with Nazi Germany). As you would expect, beyond politics, the even greater complexity of Russian-Ukrainian interactions – across the realms of (mixed) identities, beliefs, and culture, for instance – finds no reflection either.

Clearly, Zelensky decreeing history is not the place to look for an intellectually adequate, useful discussion of the fact that many more Ukrainians fought for the Soviet Union and against Nazi Germany than for Nazi Germany and against the Soviet Union. Or of biographies where Russian and Ukrainian facets were inextricably interwoven, such as that of the writer Nikolai Gogol and the even more complex cases of the painters Arkhip Kuindzhi and Ivan Aivazovsky.

But let’s be fair, Ukraine and Russia have been openly at war – and on a large scale – for almost two years now. (The causes of this avoidable war are, fundamentally, the West’s reckless, shortsighted, and cynical strategy of expanding NATO come-what-may; the Ukrainian leadership’s unforgivable decision to let the West use Ukraine and its people as a proxy to weaken Russia; and last but not least, great miscalculations on all sides.) Against that background, a Ukrainian president – even one less ill-educated than Zelensky – can hardly be expected to deliver a sophisticated lecture on the discontents of national identity. So, let’s not believe the caricature he is offering us, but let’s not get worked up about it either.

What is more intriguing is another feature of the decree. Its central explicit purpose is to protect the national identity and rights of Ukrainians living in the Russian Federation, including but not limited to six named regions, which the decree labels as “historically inhabited by ethnic Ukrainians.” The list of measures to be taken to do so is predictable and, frankly, not interesting. It is a mix of lawfare, international lobbying, and instrumentalization of academics and experts that you would expect (again with a special mission for those historians eager to let themselves be used as information warfare foot soldiers). The Ukrainian World Congress, Ukraine’s Academy of Science, and the Foreign Ministry, for instance, are all charged with making their contribution to what the decree promises will be a “truthful history” – apparently without irony. Pro tip: Truth in history, insofar as possible, never comes from a government decree.

Of greater interest is the question of what this decree is really supposed to accomplish. It is, after all, a strange document to issue now. Zelensky’s regime is facing a serious, potentially fatal decline in Western backing. The situation on the front lines – think Avdeevka, the crucial fortress town in eastern Ukraine about to be taken by Russia – is so dire that the common Western euphemism of ‘stalemate’ has simply become silly: This is not what a stalemate looks like, this is what being on the verge of losing looks like. Moscow, meanwhile, has signaled no hurry in making peace, especially after recent Ukrainian attacks inside Russia, some with major civilian casualties.

Belgorod plane attack: Why did Ukraine shoot down an aircraft carrying dozens of its own soldiers?READ MORE: Belgorod plane attack: Why did Ukraine shoot down an aircraft carrying dozens of its own soldiers?

Zelensky’s decree, it is true, does not lay any direct claims on Russian territory. Yet it does, of course, imply the possibility of such claims. This seems an odd moment to up the ante in this manner.

Did Zelensky feel that he needed something uplifting to offer for Ukrainian Unity Day? Is the decree meant to confirm that the president wants to continue the war, by hinting that as bad as things may look now, in the future, Ukraine will turn the tables? If so, it seems a risky gamble. Among Ukrainians abroad, especially in the so-called ‘diaspora’, such gestures may still play well. (And maybe that is why the Ukrainian World Congress received separate mention.) It is intriguing, in this regard, to watch Zelensky’s public address on the occasion of Unity Day. Produced in his signature high-stagecraft style (complete with a dramatic score that seems to come out of a Hollywood melodrama), it climaxes in a long sequence highlighting Ukrainians abroad. But those Ukrainians actually in Ukraine could feel alienated. For them, this decree at this time may come across as a gimmick, and worse, as revealing (or confirming?) that Zelensky is no longer attached to reality.

But what if the motives behind the decree are more complicated? Could it be an attempt to create a bargaining chip (weak, certainly, but perhaps better than nothing) for a future settlement with Russia? If that is the case, it is most likely to come across as a sign of despair, a case of clutching at straws. For it is difficult to see why future Russian negotiators would care. If Zelensky – and those around him – really still believe that yet another narrative offensive can compensate for real defeat on real battlefields, then they have learned nothing.

There is yet another possibility. And it is the most unsettling one. Recall that, just before the large-scale escalation of late February 2022, many in Ukraine and abroad did not expect the country to be able to fight for a long time. Against that backdrop, there were signals, promoted by the US, that a quick Russian victory would be followed by a shift to insurgency.

That was an awful idea. But it never went away. While most of the war has unfolded more conventionally, as a clash between large armies, there have also been infiltration, sabotage, and assassination campaigns. With the war going badly for Ukraine, some irresponsible strategists in both Washington and Kiev are bound to consider a plan B – namely, answering a Russian victory with an attempt to launch an extended insurgency.

The guerrilla-style operations undertaken up until now have one feature in common with Zelensky’s strange decree – the targeting of areas inside Russia. It may appear far-fetched, and it is a matter of speculation, but we should not rule out the possibility that Zelensky is trying to hint that Ukrainians inside Russia could become an asset in this type of warfare. If so, then the true intention of the decree would be to promote paranoia inside Russia. And the best response is to absolutely ignore it.

YouTube link here.

By Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, 1/24/24

With the war in Ukraine deepening Russia’s urgent need for weapons untouched by Western sanctions, Moscow is rapidly ramping up its relations with Iran, particularly through arms deals. And, in an unprecedented twist, the arms trade is two-way, with Iran supplying attack drones to Russia.

The two countries have nearly finalized their biggest arms deal in 30 years. Iran is selling drones to Russia that include new models that could greatly improve Russia’s offensive capability in Ukraine. Western reports say that Moscow is also negotiating to buy medium-range ballistic missiles of the new, highly accurate type that Iran has recently been firing at U.S.-linked targets in its own region.

Russia will reportedly supply Iran with its most modern Su-35 fighter planes, submarines, attack helicopters, and jet trainers, at an estimated price tag of $9 billion.

“The relationship between Russia and Iran has grown far more intense than anyone could have imagined a couple of years ago,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a Moscow-based foreign policy journal. “Who would have ever believed that Iran could become a major arms supplier to Russia?”

Though Russia and Iran are often lumped together by Western commentators as natural allies, their relationship has developed cautiously and has often been vexed by significant differences. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and turmoil in the Middle East have created mutual needs that are driving a rapid improvement in their ties.

“There is no ideological component to Russo-Iranian relations,” says Andrei Fedorov, a former Russian deputy foreign minister. “It’s purely pragmatic, a bond of ‘brothers in arms’ created by the situation.”

Experts say that Iranian drones, and “swarm” tactics for using them, have helped transform Russia’s early inferiority to Ukraine in drone warfare into a dominant position. Though Russia has no need for ballistic missile expertise, it may be looking for more ammunition than its own factories can produce as it seeks to end the Ukraine war on its own terms.

The two countries have been de facto allies in Syria’s civil war over the past decade, although until recently Russia maintained good relations with Tel Aviv and looked the other way when Israel attacked Iranian assets inside Syria. Experts say that Russia still doesn’t want to abandon its relations with Israel, which have come under growing strain since the beginning of the war in Gaza.

“Neither Russia nor Iran are interested in a big war in the Middle East,” says Mr. Lukyanov. “Despite what they sometimes say, the Iranians are behaving quite cautiously, and the hope in Moscow is that things will not get out of hand.”

The economic ties go well beyond military hardware, with Iranian consumer goods, food products, and even automobiles making their appearance in Russian markets for the first time. In the longer term, the long-discussed North-South Transport Corridor, which would link Iran’s Indian Ocean ports with Russia’s sprawling railway system, is seeing real investment for the first time and could become a reality within five years, says Mr. Fedorov.

“Russia’s view of Iran is that it must be a key part of the post-crisis architecture of the Middle East,” he says. “Russian diplomacy works to that end.”