Vladimir Putin is Winning the Iran War
Rumors of Russia's global demise are greatly exaggerated
After U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began military operations against Iran on February 28, officials and journalists predicted that Russia would suffer as a result. In a March 4 interview with Newsmax, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said, “Now that Iran is facing this full onslaught of Israel and the U.S., [that] will also degrade their capacity to export their chaos even to Russia and, therefore, to Ukraine.” On March 6, the New York Times published an article arguing that while Russian leader Vladimir Putin would reap a windfall from a rise in global oil prices, “Putin is also grappling with the arrival of a new world of unbridled American power under President Trump, which is checking Russia’s global influence and ripping up Moscow’s playbook for partnerships abroad,” including Iran.
However, Russia isn’t very reliant on Iran for drone production, as it can produce Iran’s Shahed drone domestically, which it calls the Geran. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in January that Russia can produce 500 Geran drones per day. While it’s true that Iran -- like Venezuela -- is a partner of Russia, Russia doesn’t have alliances in the sense that the U.S. has built (and now are on the brink) with European and Asian countries. Moscow has long viewed Middle Eastern and Latin American partners as fair-weather friends, and that existed before Trump. For example, while Russia could whisk Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to Moscow for a comfy exile during Joe Biden’s presidency in December 2024, it didn’t spend any military or political capital to save his regime from falling to Turkish-backed Syrian rebels.
Here are three reasons why the war is good for Russia:
The Iran War Creates Leverage Against the U.S. The revelation, first reported by the Washington Post, that Russia is providing Iran intelligence to target U.S. forces in the Middle East, has created a new pressure point that Putin can use against the U.S. Trump has refused to condemn Russia for providing Iran this intelligence.
