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.”
This evening’s Vesti broadcast on Rossiya 1 was all too typical of the narrowing horizons of prime time news programs. It opened with lengthy reporting on the devastation wrought in the city of Gorlovka, Donetsk oblast, by more than 20 incoming Ukrainian rocket artillery projectiles that struck residential apartments in the middle of last night, including from the U.S. made HIMARS system. One person was killed and a dozen more were hospitalized with various injuries.
The next news segment, substantially longer, was reporting from the front lines showing the incessant artillery and drone strikes that Russian forces are delivering near Gorlovka and elsewhere in the oblast at hardened Ukrainian defensive positions, at their infantry, artillery pieces and armored vehicles.
After that the news program moved on to reporting the disruptions to intercity traffic in central Russia due to heavy snowstorms and drifts that have shut down major highways. Truck drivers waiting out the storm were interviewed, as were the emergency workers who are supervising the snow removal and providing hot food to those in need.
From there the Vesti program shifted to commentary about today’s events at the Russian national exhibition (Forum) in Moscow’s VDNKh grounds. And of course there had to follow news about President Putin’s latest activities.
A cult of personality first appeared on Russian state television five years ago with the launch of the embarrassingly servile Sunday evening show entitled Moscow, Kremlin, Putin hosted by the youthful Pavel Zarubin, a protégé of Vladimir Solovyov and of state television news boss Dmitry Kiselyov. The cult has become ever more insistent now that the Russian electoral season is underway and every Vesti show has to give us a good dose of speeches and ribbon cutting ceremonies.
What is missing entirely from Vesti these days is international news. So it goes day after day in formulaic fashion. This, despite the fact that there is no shortage of hair-raising news from Gaza, from Iran and Pakistan, from the Houthi-U.S. confrontation in the Red Sea, among other global hot spots that Russians might just want to know about.
I do not mean to suggest that Vesti news has no merit. The military reporting from the field may be commended for giving the microphone to real Russian soldiers who are not propagandists but are speaking openly about their daily experience. Thus, we hear from the horse’s mouth that those manning the artillery who are firing with high accuracy at Ukrainian targets 37 km away, well behind the enemy lines, are obliged to move their artillery pieces within minutes of firing because there will be artillery counter strikes from the other side. This is a piece of information that puts in perspective the generalizations we in the West are told about how the Ukrainians are starved for ammunition and are firing 8 or 10 times fewer artillery projectiles daily than the Russians. It also tells us that Ukrainian reconnaissance via their own drones or otherwise is not that bad.
In criticizing Vesti I do not mean to suggest that Russian state television generally offers no information about the outside world. That you find in abundance on the talk shows Sixty Minutes and Evening with Vladimir Solovyov. Besides providing live reporting from Russia’s bureau chiefs in Berlin, New York and elsewhere, these shows draw heavily on Western news broadcasts about the major international developments of the day as well as about political events in the West: they feature video clips from CNN, Euronews and other international channels to provide material for analysis by their expert panelists. And those panelists often include area specialists on the Middle East, on China and Southeast Asia or in other topical regions who are given the microphone long enough to set out their broad concepts of what underlies the news at a serious intellectual level.
Both the aforementioned programs have deeply patriotic presenters, but they also strive for balance. True, Solovyov’s film clips and narratives from his almost weekly visits to the front extol the bravery and intelligence of the soldiers and officers with whom he meets. He sings the praises of the Russian military industrial complex, both state factories and the many private enterprises that have become suppliers of critical equipment. And yet he also gives air time to experts who explain at length why and how the Ukrainians may successfully continue the war for years in a defensive posture, so that it would be a grave mistake to be overconfident. This is precisely what I heard on Solovyov’s show this past Thursday. I rather doubt that Colonel Douglas Macgregor or Scott Ritter have lent an ear to these remarks. They should!
My intention is to demonstrate that Russia is a complex society which cannot be described in a useful manner by the simplistic words of infatuation or words of utter condemnation and vilification that predominate in U.S. and European reporting.
Russia’s state RIA news agency said on Sunday it had calculated that the West stood to lose assets and investments worth at least $288 billion if it confiscated frozen Russian assets to help rebuild Ukraine and Moscow then retaliated.
After President Vladimir Putin sent forces into Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S. and its allies prohibited transactions with Russia’s central bank and finance ministry, blocking around $300 billion of sovereign Russian assets in the West.
U.S. and British officials have worked in recent months to jumpstart efforts to confiscate Russian assets immobilized in Belgium and other European cities in order to help reconstruction in Ukraine, parts of which lie in ruins.
They hope Group of Seven leaders will agree to issue a stronger statement of intent when they meet in late February, around the second anniversary of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, three sources told Reuters on Dec. 28.
Russia has accused Washington of trying to strong-arm countries in Europe, where most of the Russian assets are, into signing up to similar measures, and the Kremlin has said that Moscow has a list of U.S., European and other assets that would be confiscated if Western countries press ahead.
RIA cited data which it said showed that direct investment by the European Union, the G7 nations, Australia and Switzerland in the Russian economy at the end of 2022 totalled $288 billion.
It said EU nations held $223.3 billion of the assets, of which $98.3 billion was formally held by Cyprus, $50.1 billion by the Netherlands and $17.3 billion by Germany.
It said the top five European investors in the Russian economy also included France with assets and investments worth $16.6 billion and Italy with $12.9 billion.
Among the G7 countries, it named Britain as one of the largest investors, citing data at the end of 2021 which showed British assets in Russia were worth about $18.9 billion.
It said the United States had $9.6 billion worth of Russian assets at the end of 2022, Japan $4.6 billion and Canada $2.9 billion.
Switzerland and Norway, which RIA said usually signed up to anti-Russian measures, had $28.5 billion and $139 million respectively at the end of 2022, it said, while data showed Australia had $683 million invested at the end of last year.
Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and a journalist who has published articles in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The American Prospect, The Nation, CounterPunch and other publications.
Ukraine and the UK announced a security agreement Jan. 12, the first of its kind and one that Kyiv hopes puts it on a glide path into NATO.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also increased military funding for Ukraine by 200 million pounds to 2.5 billion pounds in 2024-2025. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the deal an “unprecedented security agreement.” This seeming hyperbole is accurate. It is the first bilateral security pact involving Ukraine forged since the Russian invasion in 2022.
However, he then slipped into speculation, tweeting “If the UK and other countries had provided such a level of guarantees after 1991, there would have been no Russian aggression at all.”
Maybe. If such pacts had accelerated Ukraine’s entrance into NATO, before Russia recovered from its 1990s collapse, the 2022 invasion might never have occurred. However, all evidence from 2008 onward is that Moscow implacably opposed Ukraine joining NATO. If the West had moved in the 1990s to extend security guarantees to Ukraine, it is equally likely that Russia would have intervened much earlier — and if Russia was much weaker in the 1990s, so too was Ukraine.
Elements of the new UK-Ukraine security pact, like intensified intelligence sharing, have already made Moscow suspicious that the West intends to end-run a possible NATO membership, that is, to supply Ukraine with actual NATO soldiers. Indeed, the pact’s announcement drew a swift response from Kremlin hard-liner Dmitry Medvedev — no stranger to hyperbole himself — accusing London of planning just that, and threatening a nuclear response.
So what does this bode for the war’s future? Nothing good. It is not that the UK on its own can guarantee anything to Ukraine, let alone sufficient military aid to maintain Ukraine’s defense. (The British army now has only around 150 main battle tanks and in 2022 Britain’s production of artillery shells for the entire year was less than the number expended by Ukraine in a three-day period at the height of the counteroffensive. Contracts inked in 2023 to ramp up will take an estimated two years to fulfill.)
Rather, this British move will create yet another impediment to the opening of peace talks, both by increasing Russian distrust and by strengthening opponents of talks elsewhere in Europe.
The Kremlin’s goal of keeping Ukraine out of NATO has been consistent since peace talks collapsed in spring of 2022, and this latest British assault can only serve to slow Russian willingness to end combat and talk. Indeed, there’s little evidence right now that Moscow intends to cease fighting; this new security deal only makes things worse. As Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute tells me in an email, “Although as far as London is concerned much of this agreement is just the usual British play-acting as a great power, it could have serious consequences in the real world.”
In short, it’s a provocation. The British announcement comes at an especially bad time, too, amid reports that the Biden administration wants to start moving toward a negotiated settlement to end the war. This security pact ensures that no such settlement will be forthcoming soon. Because if it sketches out the West’s general refusal to contemplate a neutral Ukraine, it’s hard to see Moscow backing off.
Indeed, on Jan. 15, came news of the “Moldova Highway” between Ukraine and Romania. According to reports this highway will greatly speed the time needed to transfer U.S. weapons and equipment to Ukraine.
In addition to the security agreement funds, this pact promises “swift and sustained” help for Kyiv, if Moscow attacks again. It also advocates Ukraine’s future NATO membership, provides “comprehensive assistance to Ukraine for the protection and the restoration of its territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders,” including the maritime zone, rebuilding the economy, protecting citizens, preventing and deterring Russian military escalation, and support for Ukraine’s European integration, according to the agreement’s text.
Key elements are intelligence sharing, military and medical training, cyber security, and defense industrial cooperation. The UK’s commitment to provide thousands of military drones, “the largest ever,” according to Sunak’s office, doubtless also did little to advance peace negotiations.
In the context of President Joe Biden’s remarks two weeks ago about a “U.S.-Russia direct war” — and his earlier claim to congressional Republicans that if they failed to fund Ukraine, American and Russian soldiers would fight each other, in other words, World War III would erupt with all its dreadful nuclear implications — one might well conclude that Washington plans to follow London along the escalatory route.
“The stakes of this fight extend far beyond Ukraine,” Biden recently said, “and affect the security of both NATO and Europe.” That is an open question. There is little evidence that Moscow intends to invade other neighbors, though fears are often whipped up by the media and carelessly chattering politicians, only impeding the necessary shift toward diplomacy.
However, given the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, and Russia’s slow, steady forward movement all along the line of contact, the U.S. has indicated an interest in talks in recent months. This is the wiser of the two courses currently, albeit schizophrenically, being signaled from inside the Beltway. Ukraine is running out of manpower, and European military cupboards are bare, since almost everything was shipped to Ukraine and destroyed by Russia, while Moscow’s wartime industrial base has expanded. Meanwhile, NATO is out of ammo. Talks now would likely secure a better deal for Ukraine than they would in six months or a year.
“It is now obvious to all that the Ukrainian summer counteroffensive failed. Meanwhile, as Russian military supplies have been ramping up, Ukrainian supplies have been dwindling,” notes Nicolai Petro, University of Rhode Island professor of comparative and international politics, in an interview. “This inevitably sets the stage for a potential Russian counteroffensive.”
But recognizing that requires a depth of Western realism for which there is so far little evidence. If Russia is the victor – and that is the path events currently follow – the Kremlin will dictate the terms. And Moscow has long made clear that it must talk with Washington, not just Kyiv. Time to salvage any aspect of this fiasco for the West is running out. New aggressive security pacts just make it run out faster.
