WHY PUTIN WON’T COME TO IRAN’S RESCUE AGAINST ISRAEL
National Security Journal
June 28, 2025
Although Tehran’s current vulnerability presents important
opportunities to counter Russia’s strategic ambitions, Moscow
has long retained its influence in the region by purposefully
avoiding overcommitment to any one partner.
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Thus far, Moscow has done little to help Iran beyond
rhetorical condemnations of Israel and the US and offers to
mediate. Russian President Vladimir
Putin empowered Iran and its proxies across the Middle East
for years.
Still, he chose not to come to Iran’s rescue during the Israeli
military campaign and targeted US strikes against Iranian
nuclear facilities. His response is consistent with how the
Kremlin views partnerships: prioritizing its own needs and
avoiding over-commitment to anyone. Moscow will likely
stick to this approach as events continue to unfold in the
Middle East.
Vladimir Putin comes from a KGB circle that learned from the
strategic failure of the Soviet Union. One key lesson from this
failure was over-investment in any relationship. Russia’s
agreement with Iran is not a mutual defense
treaty,a point Putin himself made on June 18. Many
commentators were quick to point out earlier that Russia and
Iran have a signed strategic partnership, but unlike the NATO
treaty, the agreement has no mutual defense clause.
Observers
who have tracked the course of Russia’s relationship with Iran
for decades understand this agreement as one of many
arrangements that allow Russia to utilize Iran to further its
interests while avoiding liability and involvement in Iran’s
more provocative regional actions.
When Moscow intervened militarily in the Syrian civil war in
late 2015—Russia’s first expeditionary push outside the
former Soviet Union since the end of the Cold War—it had
done so only after the Syrian regime formally asked for
assistance and Tehran convinced Putin that Assad was in
danger of falling. There were no indications that the United
States would intervene in Syria to block Moscow’s efforts.
At the time, US President Barack Obama said Russia would
find itself in a quagmire—meaning Russia would have to
overinvest its resources and would find itself overextended.
However, Russia’s Syria intervention was designed precisely
to avoid overextension while mitigating domestic political
risk and blowback, a point I explain in detail in my book.
Moscow stuck to this principle of avoiding overextension to
the very end of Assad’s fall last December. Rather than
continue to invest in the Assad regime, no longer paying the
same dividends for the Kremlin as it used to, Moscow
decided to cut its losses and let him fall. To be sure, Assad’s
fall was a loss for Russia, but Moscow is prioritizing its war
on Ukraine. Assad’s loss is one the Kremlin could afford,
given the extensive diplomatic, economic, military, and
informational influence it had built in the region thanks to its
position in Syria; nor did Russia leave Syria entirely.
There are a number of obvious benefits for Russia in the
ongoing crisis that I, along with many, have already pointed
out: distraction from Ukraine (indeed, Moscow’s campaign
there has only intensified since June 13), potential rise in oil
prices that help fuel Moscow’s war effort there, and the
strategic aim to maintain good ties with all actors in the
Middle East, including the Gulf states and Israel.
Putin would not be upset if the Iranian nuclear program were
set back because it would only strengthen Russia’s position
vis-a-vis Iran. Russia has supported Iran’s nuclear
program since the mid-1990s by providing technical
assistance and building nuclear power plants. Russia’s
nuclear agency Rosatom built Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor.
Unlike the fall of Syria’s Assad, regime collapse in Tehran
would seriously damage Russia’s strategic position in the
Middle East—and broader geostrategic designs. But that has
not happened. Tehran is weakened but has few supporters to
turn to, so Moscow and Tehran are not headed for a split.
Russia would have alienated Arab states and Israel if it had
done more to support Iran. Russia no longer needs Iran for
drone technology to support its war in Ukraine, and the
military-industrial base of Russia and Iran will continue to
cooperate. At the same time, the rest of the region will still
want to purchase Russian weapons.
Western analysts may describe Russia’s behavior as short-
term tactical opportunism, but avoiding overcommitment to
partners is what allows Russia to retain its position in the long
term. Fundamentally, Moscow’s goals haven’t changed, nor
have they been deterred. Moscow still wants to remake the
world order with itself at the center. It requires China and
Iran to accomplish these goals, and they have not yet lost
either. It may continue playing a double game by trying to
have it both ways: supporting Iran but not enough to sacrifice
relationships with other key states.
Still, a weakened regime in Tehran is a significant setback for
Russia, and the West needs to capitalize on this moment. It
could highlight Russia’s failure to help Iran as part of a
broader informational narrative that Russia’s alternative to a
liberal world order is a losing one, one where few would be
safe.
It could highlight past examples of Russia’s failure to support
its allies. For instance, over the last several years, Armenia has
distanced itself from Russia, as Yerevan repeatedly felt let
down by Moscow’s inability to fulfill its military
commitments to Armenia, which are stronger than those
between Russia and Iran, to begin with.
In a world where Moscow invades Ukraine, turns it into the
largest war since World War II, and periodically blackmails
the West to scare it into doing less to support Ukraine by
showing everyone Russia’s nuclear scowl, another illiberal
regime backed by a nuclear deterrent would be more
dangerous for everyone. If Iran were to possess a nuclear
weapon, it would increase the likelihood of that regime
staying in power and, together with Russia and China,
forming a trans-Asian arc of countries that can mutually
support each other in their campaigns against the liberal
world order.
For all its efforts to avoid overextension, the Kremlin could
not prevent itself from overextending in Ukraine—here,
Moscow’s imperial impetus overrode restraint. Ukraine is the
one place where Russia is bogged down. Moscow is engaged
in a long game against the liberal free world. It is prepared to
pay a high price for winning. The liberal free world should be
committed to the same.
Anna Borshchevskaya is the Harold Grinspoon Senior Fellow in The Washington Institute’s Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation Program on Great Power Competition and the Middle East. This article was originally published on the National Security Journal website.
THE WASHINGTON INSTITUTE FOR NEAR EAST POLICY
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