A fresh conflagration in the Middle East following Israeli and then US strikes on Iran, and the Iranian response, has created a dilemma for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, for whom this volatile region is not a strategic priority, but who feels compelled nevertheless to be seen as a significant regional player. There are two risks. First, there is the risk of being irrelevant. Others create realities on the ground, and these new realities may leave Russia on the sidelines in the Middle East, undermining the credibility of its great power pretensions. Second, there is the risk of doing too much. As Russia’s key regional partner – Iran – takes a thrashing, the Kremlin could find itself inadvertently drawn into a broader conflict it cannot afford, and that would be an unwarranted distraction from the much more important theatre: Putin’s war in Ukraine.

So far, Putin has handled his Iranian problem with considerable skill, which has meant doing very little, in practice, to help Iran. This is nothing new. Moscow’s policy towards Iran – and the Middle East more generally – has been marked by opportunism born of a substantial mismatch between Russia’s modest capabilities and its great power ambitions.

Russia’s relations with the current regime in Iran go back to the latter’s very founding. The Kremlin perceived the Iranian revolution as an opportunity to acquire a new client in the Middle East, replacing the United States as Iran’s partner and friend. The Soviets, despite their ties to the Iraq of Saddam Hussein,  adopted careful neutrality during the Iran-Iraq War. They refused to take Iraq’s side for fear of antagonising Tehran. Saddam was angered by such treachery and vented his frustration in letters to the Soviet leaders: ‘These actions, respected comrade [Brezhnev], leave a bitter residue in one’s soul…’

The Soviet war in Afghanistan made it difficult, however, for Tehran to engage productively with its northern neighbour. It was only after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 that the relationship began to develop, especially when the Russians embraced opportunities for trade in arms and in sensitive technologies. No business deal was more sensitive than Moscow’s agreement, in 1995, to build a civilian nuclear reactor at Bushehr. The Americans were alarmed by the possibility that Iran would redirect these technologies to its weapons programme, but Russian-Iranian cooperation continued, and the Bushehr reactor began operations in 2010.

Meanwhile, Moscow and Tehran engaged in a broad conversation about their shared vision of the world order, finding themselves to be more or less on the same page. Both were in favour of ‘multipolarity’ and keeping the United States and other Western powers out of what each regarded as their ‘sphere of influence’ in the Caspian and in the Caucasus. As Hassan Rouhani (later president of Iran) told the Russians in 1995: ‘It’s important to make sure that third countries do not get involved in our relations. Iran and Russia must make sure that our enemies are frustrated in their hope that we fall out.’

Still, the Russian-Iranian relationship was not problem-free. The Kremlin watched jealously for signs of rapprochement between Tehran and Washington and – by some accounts at least – secretly worked to undermine the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which, Putin reportedly feared, would lead to the reduction of Iranian support for Russia’s other regional ally, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. Raising Western sanctions on Iran could also lower world oil prices, a problem for an oil exporter like Russia. Above all, the normalisation of Iran’s relations with the West could work against Putin’s efforts to build an alternative ‘bloc’ of countries that would defer to his idea of post-Western world order.

Fortunately for Putin, this normalisation never happened. Instead, with the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Tehran proved a reliable partner, willing to supply military technologies to Russia, most importantly, drones. Moreover, in January 2025, Russia and Iran signed a treaty on a comprehensive strategic partnership that calls for a further deepening of bilateral military cooperation, even as it rails against ‘unipolarity and hegemony in world affairs’ (a clear reference to the United States).

Israel’s strikes against Iran beginning on 13 June 2025, created a certain expectation that Russia would do something for the sake of its strategic partner. True, it was not obliged to. The partnership treaty – which in any case was not even officially in force – does not have a mutual defence clause (which makes it a non-aggression pact, rather than a treaty of alliance). But, after all, Iran came to Russia’s help in Ukraine: wasn’t it only just that the Kremlin reciprocated?

When, on 20 June, Putin was asked as to what he planned to do, the Russian president was non-committal. He attempted to construct a rationalisation for Russia’s inaction, which included, bizarrely, the notion that Israel was an ‘almost Russian-speaking country’, that Russia had a large Muslim population (which is largely Sunni), and had extensive ties in the Arab world (which, from the logic of his comments, he could not afford to antagonise by siding with Shia Iran). Putin also claimed that, even by remaining in Iran, at the civilian nuclear sites, which the Russians still helped run, Moscow was helping their Iranian friends.

All of these arguments fall short. There are in reality two basic reasons why Putin has been treading cautiously. First, he is worried about running foul of the United States and President Donald Trump, who not only backed Israel’s strikes on Iran but, on 22 June, ordered the US military to carry out its own strikes on the country. For months, Putin has worked hard to entice Trump into pulling the plug on Ukraine. These efforts have not been wholly successful, but even what limited progress has been achieved can be easily jeopardised if Trump comes to see Russia as a spoiler in the Iranian game.

Instead, what Putin has tried to do in his own dialogue with Trump has been to highlight Russia’s usefulness as a potential mediator, an offer that Trump seemingly rejected out of hand. As the latter put it: ‘He [Putin] actually offered to help mediate, and I said: do me a favour. Mediate your own. Let’s mediate Russia first, okay?’

The second—and related—reason why Putin can’t do much about Iran is simply that all of his efforts currently and for the foreseeable future are concentrated on Ukraine. He can ill afford to divert any military equipment, least of all drones and missiles, to Iran even if he were asked to (and it is not clear that he has been asked to). Putin has argued rather that the Russians are helping Iran by fighting the same forces (i.e. the West) that are also opposed to Iran.

Following US strikes on Iran, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi travelled to Moscow with a letter from Ayatollah Khamenei. The content of this latter has not been disclosed. Putin received Araghchi on 22 June. In carefully weighed comments, he noted that ‘the completely unprovoked aggression against Iran has no basis and no justification whatsoever’. He did not mention the United States. The Russian foreign ministry was a little more forthcoming, condemning the American bombardment of Iran, while former president Dmitry Medvedev – known for his militant and radical pronouncements – hinted in a tweet at the prospect of Russia supplying Iran with nuclear warheads. This immediately triggered a sharp and threatening rebuke from Trump. Medvedev promptly dialled down his rhetoric, probably not without an annoyed prod from the Kremlin.

Through his inction in the face of an acute regional crisis, Putin has undermined his credibility in the Middle East, which has already suffered a serious setback in the wake of the overthrow of the Syrian dictator and Putin’s long-time client Bashar al-Assad. He has shown clearly that Russia’s regional influence is not as great as it seemed just a decade ago. Back then, the Kremlin intervened decisively to rescue a desperate client in Syria. Now Putin is stuck in the Ukrainian quagmire and has neither the capability nor the intention to bail out his Iranian friends if and when they come to grief.

For a cynical strategist like Putin, this is not a problem. Iran – and the Middle East more broadly – are just a sideshow to Russia. What happens here matters, not least because it can make oil prices go up or down. In the end, what really matters to Putin is what happens on the battlefields of Ukraine. It is on his conquest of Ukraine that he has pinned his legacy, not on his provisional non-alliance with the Iranian regime and the brave new multipolar world that it allegedly represents.