Russia and Iran are not natural allies – despite close ties since 1989, Tehran has never really been able to rely on Moscow. In the meantime, the power imbalance in the Russian-Iranian relationship has reversed: Iran is now supplying the weapons.
Iran denies everything. “We have not supplied any of the countries at war with weapons,” said a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry on Monday. According to the Ukrainian account, this is an outright lie, and the EU doesn’t believe Iran either. The deadly drones that Russia is using to terrorize Ukraine appear to be of Iranian manufacture.
At their meeting on Monday, the foreign ministers of the European Union already agreed on sanctions against the Iranian moral police, against individuals and organizations. It is a reaction to the Iranian regime’s violence against the protest movement in the country. Further punitive measures against Iran, this time because of the drone deliveries to Russia, are considered likely.
If the EU also officially comes to the conclusion that the Ukrainian information is correct and that Iran is actually supplying arms to Russia, sanctions will be unavoidable. Paradoxically, this could tie Iran even more closely to Russia. Because Russian-Iranian relations are based on a simple principle: the enemy of my enemy must be my friend. The stronger the opposition to the West, the closer the partnership between Moscow and Tehran.
From the Iranian point of view, the history of Russian-Iranian relations is one of betrayal. For example, between 2006 and 2010, Russia voted for all six resolutions passed in the UN Security Council against Iran. Time and again, relations with Israel and the West were more important to Moscow than relations with Iran. Whether it was about rocket deliveries or Israeli attacks on targets in Syria: Russia has repeatedly proved to be an unreliable partner. Promised missiles have not been delivered, and to this day Russia has not prevented Israel from launching airstrikes in Syria, including Iranian targets in Syria.
Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, had rejected the West and the then Eastern Bloc in equal measure. This was mutual: after the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Soviet Union feared that the mullahs in power there could export their ideology to the Muslim regions of the USSR.
This attitude ended with Khomeini’s death in 1989. Iranian Parliament Speaker Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who became president shortly thereafter, visited Moscow a few weeks after Khomeini’s death, where there was mutual assurance that the interests of the other side would be respected. At the same time, the Soviet Union promised to equip the Iranian army. This move could have “far-reaching geopolitical consequences,” the Washington Post said at the time. That’s how it happened.
Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, relations between Russia and Iran remained close and the dependence one-sided. Russia supplied weapons including tanks, missiles, submarines and fighter jets. Since the mid-1990s, Iran has also received support from Russia to expand its own missile program. The Iranian nuclear program is based on Russian technology transfer.
The West has assumed for years that Iran’s nuclear program is designed to develop nuclear weapons. A 2015 agreement to contain and monitor Iran’s nuclear ambitions was canceled three years later by then-US President Donald Trump. After the change of government in Washington, the nuclear agreement should be revived.
The more it became clear that this would not succeed, the more openly Iran sided with Russia. A week after the start of the Russian war of aggression, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that the USA was “partly responsible for the current crisis”, but he also called for “an early end to the war and the destruction and killing of civilians”. When Putin came to Tehran four months later, it sounded much sharper: If Russia hadn’t “taken the initiative, then the other side would have taken the initiative and started the war,” Khamenei claimed, pledged support for Russia. From the Iranian point of view, it now makes no difference whether it appears as an ally of Russia. At the latest since September, when the regime in Tehran had the protests beaten down in the country, it has been impossible anyway for its international position to improve. It doesn’t matter that France and Great Britain classify the drone deliveries as a breach of the nuclear agreement.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has meant that the relationship of dependency between Iran and Russia is beginning to reverse. Weapons deliveries are now running in the opposite direction. As early as April, almost seven weeks after the start of the Russian attack on Ukraine, the British “Guardian” reported that Iran was smuggling ammunition and weapons to Russia, including mobile anti-tank weapons, anti-tank missiles and Brazilian rocket launchers.
The aid was not about old ties, but about specific interests: “If the Putin regime is destabilized, it would have a huge impact on Iran, especially in Syria, where Damascus is dependent on Russian air support and where Russia is coordinating to to avoid a direct conflict with Israel,” the newspaper quoted a Middle East expert as saying.
With the war in Syria, Iran and Russia have deepened their strategic partnership. Both countries were closely allied with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad even before the war began; both were concerned with ensuring the survival of his regime while at the same time limiting US influence in the region.
In July, US President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, said the US had indications that the government in Tehran was “preparing to rapidly deploy several hundred unmanned aerial vehicles, including those capable of carrying weapons,” meaning: drones. Iran will also train Russians in how to use it. Such training could begin as early as mid-July.
Iran denied that. “We work together with Russia in various ways, including on defense,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Hussein Amirabdollahian said at the time. “We will not help either side involved in this war because we believe it must end.” When Putin made his state visit to Tehran in July, both sides denied that drones were discussed.
A week later, the United States said it had “seen no sign of the Russian Defense Ministry supplying or purchasing Iranian drones.” Apparently that changed shortly thereafter: the first Iranian drones were brought from Iran to Russia in transport planes, the Washington Post reported in August, citing information from the US government. In total, there are hundreds of drones of different types.
Most of these drones are produced in Iran, but recently also in Tajikistan. On May 17, an Iranian drone factory opened in the former Soviet republic. The location is advantageous for Iran in several ways: It is closer to Russia, which maintains a military base in the Tajik capital Dushanbe, and further away from Israel, from where attacks on Iranian drone factories are threatening. As recently as February, dozens or hundreds of Iranian drones were reportedly destroyed in one such attack – also with drones. The attack, which Israel has not confirmed, is considered part of the clandestine war between the two countries.
Iran also maintains production facilities for drones in Syria. In July, the Israeli Air Force attacked a target near the Syrian capital Damascus to destroy one such factory.
It is often assumed that Iran’s delivery of arms to Russia could be an indication that Russia is running out of missiles. As early as April, the Guardian wrote that being dependent on the smuggling of Iranian arms “would signal a dramatic shift in Russian strategy” as Moscow was forced to rely on Iran.
Such assumptions are not really verifiable. How long Russia will still have missiles “cannot be reliably predicted,” said Austrian military strategist Philipp Eder in an interview with ntv.de. “No army in the world announces such inventories – not even to allies.” However, he also said it was “already a sign that an army like the Russian one needs to buy Iranian drones”.
