“The war will not affect Russian plans in Ukraine – but it will likely force a rethink of long-held Russian strategic concepts.”
Chatham House published an analysis on March 2, ‘The Iran war exposes the limits of Russia’s leverage in a fragmenting regional order’, by Grégoire Roos (see: https://www.chathamhouse.org/2026/03/iran-war-exposes-limits-russias-leverage-fragmenting-regional-order ). In my opinion, the report takes a very matter-of-fact approach to the war in Iran’s possible ramifications for Russia’s multi-layered geopolitical situation and relations with Iran, the region, and the international community, as well as for its war in Ukraine.
What effects will this war have on Russia’s strategy toward Iran, the Middle East, and the international arena?
While Russia has been procuring military equipment from Iran, including Shahed drone systems and components, and Iran’s military resources and infrastructure are being levelled, how will that impact Russia’s military requirements and its war on Ukraine?
Iran-Russia Military Agreement and Structure
On January 17, 2025, Russia and Iran signed 2025 Iran-Russia Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty. The agreement is a 20-year pact that reinforces military, intelligence, and economic ties between the two nations, with a focus on defence industry cooperation, joint military exercises, and technology sharing. But it’s important to note that the treaty does not contain a mutual defence clause; ergo, Russia is not stepping up to defend Iran militarily against the US and Israel, of course.
“The new document replaces the agreement on the foundations of relations and principles of cooperation between Russia and Iran, signed in 2001. The agreement covers various areas: economic, trade, energy, scientific, technological, and military.”
According to sources, Russia has received up to 4 billion dollars in value (since 2021) of Iranian military equipment and technology. This help has come in the form of artillery ammunition, body armour, firearms, training, missile systems, new and old drone systems, components, and production technology, including the construction of domestic drone production facilities in Russia, which are now operational. The report suggests that Russia can now sustain itself without Iranian-sourced drones. Moscow’s leaders long realized that they could not depend on outside suppliers for armaments and defence equipment, that Russia must become self-sufficient.
Iran Sent Russia $2.7 Billion Worth of Missiles Alone: https://militarnyi.com/en/blogs/iran-sent-russia-2-7-billion-worth-of-missiles-alone/
Armaments Reliance Realities, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, NATO
As an aside, because of the war in Ukraine, NATO countries have also come to terms with the sobering reality that each member nation needs to become more self-sufficient in a variety of defence items, armaments, etc., for strategic, security, and logistical reasons. Some NATO countries are now pumping money into subsidizing domestic production of artillery ammunition (Canada included). The Ukrainian army eats up artillery like it’s nothing, firing between 2,000 and 7,000 rounds a day. In contrast, allegedly, the Russian forces can fire up to 20,000–60,000+ rounds daily– imagine being on the receiving end. (The Russians were buying North Korean ammunition, including artillery ammunition, but much of it was faulty, unreliable and turned out to be dangerous to fire, ergo, the need for self-reliance.)
I’d say that most of Ukraine’s artillery ammunition has been provided for or paid for by NATO countries. In some cases, artillery ammunition was drawn from countries’ own stocks, which depleted those reserves and created shortages, while production facilities have struggled to keep up with demand.
Effect On Russia’s War On Ukraine
The Chatham House article used an interesting phrase, i.e. “strategically hedging,” to describe how Moscow will use the war on Iran to “make the most of the US distraction in the hope of depriving Kyiv of media oxygen and pushing the war on Ukraine into the background.” I think that it is a given that the Kremlin would roll with the attack on Iran as a distraction. Nonetheless, even if the bombing of Iran is a distraction from the war in Ukraine, it’s not by Russian design but circumstance.
Roos believes that “the situation in Iran is unlikely to hinder Moscow’s plans in Ukraine, or to tilt the battlefield.” He might be right. However, I believe that Iran’s smackdown will have some ramifications on Russia’s war effort in Ukraine at some levels. Let’s see.
Iran Nuclear Deal Russia Link
The Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), pushed by US President Obama, had a key role for Russia as a P5+1 negotiator in the 2015 agreement. Russia tried to enable Iranian technical compliance by shipping out Iran’s excess enriched uranium (transporting Iran’s enriched uranium to Russian territory and returning natural uranium) and supplying the Bushehr nuclear plant with fuel. As a mediator at the time, Moscow was maneuvering for its own interests, trying to secure economic ties with Iran while hoping to avoid regional conflict.
By 2018, the U.S. and other intelligence agencies claimed that Iran was holding back on some enriched uranium and continued to try to build the bomb secretly.
US President Donald Trump killed the JCPOA in 2018, calling it a “disaster” and “the worst deal ever,” because it failed to disuade Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs.
Under President Biden, and after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Moscow initially supported the revival of the JCPOA, but as Russia came under increasing international and US pressure and sanctions, it began placing conditions on the negotiations, such as sanctions relief. The result was no new agreement. The lack of a new deal made Iran volatile in everyone’s eyes, including Russia.
China Variable
And, of course, the article touches on China. Roos wrote, “Moscow must also navigate the China variable, since Beijing – not Moscow – might well come out as a more consequential external actor in a post-war Iran than one might think.” He could be right. When this conflict in Iran ends, especially if the regime survives in whatever form or not, China’s soft power strategy in the region and its purchase of some 80% of Iran’s total oil exports ought to put it in a good position. But will China economically be hurt by the immediate aftermath of the war?
China became the new broker in the Middle East after it negotiated the reopening of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran three years ago, which also helped support the ongoing peace process in Yemen.
In the meantime, China has also become Saudi Arabia’s largest oil customer.
If, in a post-war Iran, China emerges in a better strategic position than Moscow perhaps would like, it will be interesting to see how the Russians contend with that new order.
Russia’s Posture
Roos provides a good explanation about Russia’s challenges at the moment, its uncomfortable and strained posture in the region, especially in the eyes of its anti-Western allies, lays out the complexities of its position, and how “the war tests Russia’s strategic patience, ideological narrative, and capacity to maintain agency in a rapidly fragmenting region.”
With the Iran war and events in Venezuela, Russia is facing a new reality: diplomacy isn’t what it used to be.
Needless to say, Russia faces risks in backing Iran while the Islamic Republic directly or indirectly attacks its neighbours by using its proxies in the region. Russia is in a hard spot on the world stage, but I reckon it will survive the Iran crisis, for better or for worse, regardless of whether the Iranian regime remains in power or not.
–RdM
🔴ADDENDUM: 14 March: Re: “As part of a structural rebalancing, Iranian Shahed drones and components, once critical stopgaps, have been integrated into Russian production lines. Russia now produces substantial quantities of similar systems domestically, making continued Iranian deliveries less essential.”
◆ To manufacture drones, it requires components, including specialized specific components, energetic materials, etc. If Russia has been buying and receiving components from Iran to assemble drones in Russia, the US and Israel’s bombardment of Iran’s military infrastructure will have an impact, as they have destroyed anything associated with drone and missile manufacturing inside Iran.
However, Russia may be presently self-sufficient in the materials it needs to build drones.
Or, it is also possible that China is supplying components needed for drone manufacturing, components that easily circumvent sanctions on Russia. China was providing Iran with goods for military production. China has been knowingly exporting goods, items, resources, products and technology to Russia that can be used militarily and for military-related manufacturing, but technically these things do not violate the sanctions.
— RdM
The Chatham House Report Below:
The Iran war exposes the limits of Russia’s leverage in a fragmenting regional order
The war will not affect Russian plans in Ukraine – but it will likely force a rethink of long-held Russian strategic concepts.
Expert comment
Published 2 March 2026 —4 minute READ
Image — Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the International Peace and Trust Forum in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan in November 2025. (Photo by Iranian Presidency/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Grégoire Roos
Director, Europe and Russia and Eurasia Programmes
In a diplomatic note to the Iranian government dated 29 March 1944, Vyacheslav Molotov, then foreign minister of the Soviet Union, noted that ‘the Soviet Union [couldn’t] remain indifferent to the fate of Iran’. That statement crystallized a perennial tenet of Soviet foreign policy – one that still synthesizes much of Moscow’s approach to the Middle East today: Iran is not a dispensable peripheral actor. It is a structural node on the southern flank of the Russian Central Asian zone of influence.
The current military confrontation between Iran on the one side, and the United States (US) and Israel on the other, might well push this logic to its limits. Moscow may be forced to navigate a new and possibly perilous geometry of utility, ideology, and strategic restraint.
Depending on the war’s outcome, the Kremlin might see its already wobbly strategic architecture in the Middle East so badly undermined that it is compelled to reassess its regional calculus.
Russia’s reckoning
Russia’s public posture in response to the military action against Iran has been one of sharp rhetorical condemnation. Moscow has labelled the strikes ‘unprovoked acts of armed aggression’ and warned of regional and global instability unless diplomacy is restored.
But Russia will obviously not enter into any kind of military confrontation with the US and Israel. Nor has it sent Tehran the least sign that it may provide any form of support.
The Kremlin’s next steps will likely be calibrated to uphold its credibility as a counter-Western partner but avoid being drawn into a second high-intensity conflict. It will also seek to preserve bargaining space with Washington on other issues – not least the negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.
Until the situation in Iran is clarified, the keywords for Moscow will be ‘strategic hedging’. In other words, it will seek to make the most of the US distraction in the hope of depriving Kyiv of media oxygen and pushing the war on Ukraine into the background.
The nuclear dimension: From energy cooperation to strategic risk
But the current developments in Iran are not without deeper implications for Moscow, particularly relating to the nuclear question.
Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), enrichment levels and stockpiles were embedded in a negotiated framework in which Russia was an instrumental participant. That framework is now gone.
US and Israeli strikes during June’s so-called ‘Twelve-Day War’ had already significantly degraded elements of Iran’s enrichment infrastructure. The ongoing war is now moving to the next level, shifting the nuclear issue from managed diplomacy and short-term surgical strikes to outright coercive force with a clear longer-term ambition of regime change.
For Moscow, this changes the calculus in three ways. First, a weakened, yet unresolved nuclear file preserves Iran’s strategic relevance while increasing the volatility surrounding the country. Any engagement with an Iranian regime that has now struck at almost every country across the Arabian peninsula won’t go without a political risk. Related workWith Iran attacks, President Trump is making the use of force the new normal – and casting aside international law
This reflects a deeper structural irony: the very cooperation that once bound Russia and Iran economically and technologically may now expose Moscow to reputational and operational dilemmas.
Second, the normalization of preventive strikes against nuclear infrastructure erodes the diplomatic architecture that Russia once used to project influence and political legitimacy in the region.
Third and certainly not least, if Tehran emerges either significantly enfeebled or forced into a coercive settlement with Washington, Moscow will lose leverage in a region where its room for manoeuvre has already significantly narrowed after the fall of Assad in Syria.
Ukraine war dependencies: Diminished but still relevant
The death of Iran’s Supreme Leader and the heightened military pressure from a growing number of countries could indicate that Moscow’s influence in the region may be waning.
But the situation in Iran is unlikely to hinder Moscow’s plans in Ukraine, or to tilt the battlefield. Russia’s need for Iranian support in sustaining its war has already declined, as Moscow has internalized production of weapons systems that it once sourced from Tehran.
As part of a structural rebalancing, Iranian Shahed drones and components, once critical stopgaps, have been integrated into Russian production lines. Russia now produces substantial quantities of similar systems domestically, making continued Iranian deliveries less essential.
This reduces the short-term operational risk to Moscow should the conflict in Iran become protracted. Russia can absorb Iranian instability without immediate capability collapse.
But that insulation comes with a cost. The partnership could grow less reciprocal and even more transactional that it had already become in recent months.
The asymmetry creates leverage for Tehran (which has been providing Moscow with strategic expertise on sanctions circumvention) but reduces incentives for the Kremlin to defend a partner under existential pressure.
The risk of sequential attrition
Russia’s Middle Eastern posture was historically supported by layered and strategically complementary partnerships – with Syria as a western anchor and Iran as an eastern axis. But Russian influence in Damascus has eroded over the past decade, leaving Tehran’s role more conspicuous and, paradoxically, more fragile in Moscow’s strategic calculus.
If Iran becomes consumed by war, and if its capacity to act as a regional balancer wanes, Russia faces a sequential attrition of strategic depth. The wider geopolitical architecture could shift, from a multipolar balance where Moscow plays off rivals against each other, to a more fragmented environment in which Russia is reactive rather than proactive.
This is significant because regional power projection relies as much on predictability and stability in adjacent zones as on the mere presence of partner regimes. A war-consumed Iran introduces new uncertainties along Russia’s southern arc, from the Caucasus to Central Asia, where Moscow’s standing has also eroded.
Ideological positioning and the narrative of multipolarity
‘Russia will seek the formation of a multipolar world’, remarked Yevgeny Primakov, Russia’s prime minister and foreign policy grand strategist, in 1998. That would become the cornerstone of the Kremlin’s foreign policy narrative: a drive for a multipolar world in which powers like Iran, China, and Russia balance the perceived hegemony of the US and the ‘collective West’.
The war’s trajectory…impacts not just material balance but also the normative legitimacy of Moscow’s grand strategic conception.
In this framework, Primakov treated Iran’s capacity as a structural counterweight within a broader Eurasian balance – one that blurs the boundary between Europe and Asia and challenges the idea that Europe is institutionally and strategically Western.
In today’s context, however, that thesis is under strain. If the US and Israel succeed in degrading Iran’s strategic position, the narrative of a resilient multipolar order loses ideological traction.
The war’s trajectory therefore impacts not just material balance but also the normative legitimacy of Moscow’s grand strategic conception.
Risk spill-over, regional alignment, and Russia’s options
A prolonged war raises critical questions about spill-over effects – from refugee flows to the proliferation of arms and militant networks. For Russia, whose southern flank security strategy has historically relied on internal and regional stability, this is not peripheral.
At the same time, Russia’s options are constrained. It cannot militarily balance the US–Israel coalition in the Middle East. And it lacks the economic weight to fully underwrite Tehran if Iran is isolated post-conflict.
Moscow must also navigate the China variable, since Beijing – not Moscow – might well come out as a more consequential external actor in a post-war Iran than one might think.
Thus, Russia is faced with a strategic dilemma: should it prioritize managed distancing and diplomatic leverage, or entrench deeper into a partnership that exposes it to systemic risk and greater regional geopolitical volatility?
Strategic resilience in a fragmented landscape
In some regards, Molotov’s insight about Iran’s strategic salience for Moscow remains relevant today. But the context has shifted dramatically. Russia is not operationally dependent on Iran for its war in Ukraine – that helps in the short term. But Russia is exposed to the broader geopolitical turbulence that Iran’s war with the US and Israel creates.
The war tests Russia’s strategic patience, ideological narrative, and capacity to maintain agency in a rapidly fragmenting region. The partnership of convenience that once served as a buffer is now a variable in a much larger equation – one where Russian influence is neither pre-eminent nor entirely optional. It is contingent, negotiated, and increasingly vulnerable to shifts far beyond Moscow’s direct control. And loss of control sits uneasily with Kremlinology…
RDM Security & Defence: https://rdmsecurityanddefence.com/
Excellent Presentation Royce, ( as always ). Geo-Political and Regional Issues, are always intrinsically tied to Social/Economical/Military Issues. Suffice to say; One can not be delt with, without the others. It is the complexity of Negotiation and Diplomacy.
If only the ” Liberal ” understood that.
Cheers!
Thanks, Brent.