The misfortune of an adversary can often seem like a boon, and in recent weeks, Moscow has certainly appeared to be a beneficiary of the United States’ miring itself in a war in Iran. Oil prices have risen markedly, some sanctions on Russian and Iranian oil have been temporarily waived, and Western attention has fractured. Russia’s coffers have been refilling, and Russia-Ukraine peace talks with the United States are paused because “the Americans have a lot of other things to deal with, if you know what I mean,” as Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, reportedly told Russian state media this week.
Iran has held on for weeks, generating enormous costs to the global economy as it did so, until a limited cease-fire was announced on Tuesday night. The Iranian authorities may be trumpeting this fragile cease-fire as a strategic victory, but even if it holds, the country is thoroughly battered, poorer and more isolated. If it collapses and the war resumes, the cumulative weight of military strikes, sanctions and internal unrest could tip Iran toward fragmentation or implosion.
Both of these outcomes should be — and probably are — giving President Vladimir Putin of Russia pause. Iran is a Russian partner that, even before this war, has generated costs for America without requiring Russian exposure. From the Kremlin’s perspective, it is something close to irreplaceable.
When Iranian long-range Shahed drones first appeared over Ukrainian cities in 2022, they seemed to represent a new phase of the relationship between Russia and Iran. For decades, Tehran had seen Moscow less as a trusted partner and more as a cynical great power that would, as it did in 2010, back U.N. sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program if that suited Russian interests. But habits of cooperation that were built and refined over the course of the war in Syria, from around 2015, had evolved, by the time Russia invaded Ukraine, into a partnership.
The regimes are bound by the same grievance: the conviction that the U.S.-led international order is designed to contain them. This shared belief has generated cooperation across intelligence, finance and an elaborate sanctions-evasion architecture. Iran has integrated lessons from the war in Ukraine — drone saturation, electronic warfare, the vulnerabilities of armored columns — into its own military operations. Russia has observed how Iran sustains irregular warfare across multiple theaters simultaneously, projecting force through proxies and preserving plausible deniability.
In January 2025, the two signed a partnership agreement that ratified much of their cooperation. The treaty contains no mutual defense clause. Moscow has never promised to fight the United States on Iran’s behalf, or vice versa. The point was for each to ensure that the other had what it needed to fight longer on its own.
Both regimes are built on the premise that dissent is an enemy to be crushed, and the tools of repression — surveillance, internet controls and crowd-suppression tactics — are as much worth sharing as any weapons system. When protests erupted across Iran in January, the internet blackout was more severe and sophisticated than previous blackouts, and used similar methods to those Russia has used in Ukraine, according to independent monitors. Around the same time, video footage on social media seemed to show Iran using Russian armored vehicles to suppress the protests.
The relationship, in short, is about much more than drones. It is dense, diversified and in important respects self-reinforcing — each layer of cooperation makes the next layer easier to build and harder to dismantle.
When Mr. Putin sent Russian jets into Syria in 2015, he was intervening to save President Bashar al-Assad from a civil war that Mr. Assad, despite his brutality, was no longer capable of mastering. Moscow was preserving a client, a ruler whose survival depended on outside force and whose utility lay mainly in what he allowed Russia to keep: influence, bases and a foothold in the region.
But when Mr. Assad started to fall in late 2024, Mr. Putin let him. The war in Ukraine had made intervention logistically difficult, but the decision was also a judgment about whether the cost of saving a client like Mr. Assad exceeded what he was worth. His state had been hollowed out by years of war and corruption, and what remained was too weak to project influence, and too dependent to offer strategic returns.
Iran is not a client of Russia’s. It is a state with its own revolutionary logic, its own regional reach and its own willingness to confront American power. During this war, by militarizing the Strait of Hormuz, it has demonstrated that it can generate effects that will be quickly and amply felt immediately across the world. It can exert pressure on the United States in ways that Russia, bogged down in Ukraine, cannot. If anything, for Russia these past few weeks have demonstrated precisely Iran’s worth.
Iran’s path to ending the war on acceptable terms will narrow if fighting resumes and could close entirely if the fighting continues at length. If the Islamic republic falls, no other country in Russia’s orbit can fill its role. China is too integrated into the global economy. North Korea, which has supplied Russia with weapons and soldiers in Ukraine, cannot project power far beyond the Korean Peninsula.
Mr. Putin, four years into the war in Ukraine, does not have the capacity for a Russian military intervention in Iran. Even if he did, escalating so visibly would risk consequences in the areas where Russia is most vulnerable, through weapons deliveries to Kyiv, tightened secondary sanctions or more intelligence sharing. Each increment of support for Iran has to be weighed against what it might cost in Ukraine.
The question, more likely, is how to continue to act without being seen to do so. The Kremlin has tools for influence short of conventional military force: private military contractors who can provide training or protection to factions whose survival serves Russian interests, and arms flows through the sanctions-evasion networks that Iran and Russia have spent years constructing. Russia is already providing intelligence support and electronic-warfare assistance, albeit in limited form. And European intelligence reports of Russian drone deliveries to Iran would fit the pattern of assistance that is consequential enough to matter but ambiguous enough to deny.
Mr. Putin has spent years building a coalition of the discontented around the premise that authoritarian states can outlast Western pressure; that regimes built for endurance — which absorb decades of sanctions, surveil their publics and suppress dissent — cannot be undone.
Iran, which has absorbed the most pressure and held the longest, is his proof of concept. As a failed state, it would become his slow-motion liability.
Nicole Grajewski is an assistant professor at Sciences Po, in Paris, an associate at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the author of the forthcoming “Russia and Iran: Partners in Defiance From Syria to Ukraine.”
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