For decades, Moscow has been Iran’s main international backer, shielding it from United Nations resolutions while trying to ease Western sanctions and sell billions of dollars worth of weaponry to Tehran.
Russian President Vladimir Putin criticized Saturday’s assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as a “cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law.”
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Former Prime Minister and Putin’s former successor, Dmitry Medvedev, sardonically called US President Donald Trump a “peacemaker who showed his true colors.”
Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Federal Assembly, compared the war to what he said were the West’s collective attempts to destabilize Russia in the 1990s, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said talks between the United States and Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program “were downgraded to direct aggression.”
But as US and Israeli airstrikes against Iran continued for a fourth day on Tuesday, Russia appeared poised to benefit from the war far more than it appeared to lose.
Moscow’s most immediate gain is an increase in its oil revenues.
The price of Russian Ural crude oil fell to a new low in late February, at $40 per barrel, due to deep discounts caused by Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine.
But while the price of international benchmark Brent crude rose 13 percent on Monday, reaching $82 per barrel, Ural was trading at $57.
“Russian oil will be sought”
Russia, Iran and Venezuela are the world’s main producers of heavy crude oil that is exported to dozens of countries to be processed in their refineries.
Venezuela’s exports stagnated after U.S. special forces captured President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3 and the White House gained control of Caracas’ oil trade.
The suspension of Iran’s exports means that oil refineries designed to process heavy crude will have to rely on Ural oil from Russia.
“It means that Russian oil will be sought because rebuilding the technological processes of oil refineries takes a long time and costs a lot,” Igar Tyshkevych, a political analyst based in the Ukrainian capital, kyiv, told Al Jazeera. “This means that discounts for Russian oil will change.”
If oil prices continue to rise, the Kremlin could propose increasing supply in exchange for Washington’s decision to partially lift sanctions.
Increased Russian oil production would drive down U.S. oil prices ahead of the November midterm elections, he said.
A second, longer-term gain could be Moscow’s attempt to mediate peace talks between Tehran and Washington.
“It has been attempted several times during the US-Iran conflicts,” Tyshkevych said. “It didn’t always work, but Russia can try.”
In March 2025, Putin offered to mediate negotiations between the United States and Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program and three months later he repeated the offer as American and Israeli strikes hit Iran during a 12-day war.
Washington ignored his offer on both occasions.
Conflicts with Iran have distracted Trump from trying to reach a US-brokered deal to the Russia-Ukraine war, which entered its fifth year on February 24.
The talks have stalled because Moscow has continued to urge Ukraine to abandon the kyiv-controlled part of the Donetsk region in southeastern Ukraine.
Washington will continue to pressure both sides to reach a deal, turning the talks into a game of “who blinks first,” Tyshkevych said.
“No one wants to say ‘no’ first, but instead tries to create the conditions for the opponent to say ‘no’ out loud and slam the door,” he said.
And as the attention of Washington and other Western powers focuses on the war in Iran, Russia has several weeks to craft a new agenda for Trump, he said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine could face a shortage of US-supplied missiles for Patriot air defense systems, which can shoot down Russian ballistic missiles, analysts have warned.
Patriot missiles are being redirected toward Washington’s allies in the Middle East.
“We felt a serious deficit before the war and there is a high probability that the situation will worsen,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of the General Staff of the Ukrainian army, told Al Jazeera.
Patriot missiles “are made in very low quantities. The Americans have tried to change it, but with so much demand, it can’t be done quickly,” he said.
However, Putin faces a difficult choice between Washington and Tehran, according to a Russian Iran expert.
“Moscow has to choose, and for Putin it is a very difficult choice because, on the one hand, he does not want to have a fight with Trump, but on the other, the regime in Tehran is one of the few serious foreign partners of the Kremlin for now,” Ruslan Suleymanov, an associate fellow at the New Eurasian Strategies Center, an American-British think tank, told Al Jazeera.
“Furthermore, the most difficult choice is between Iran and Israel,” he said.
The Kremlin has sought to maintain a pragmatic partnership with Israel.
“If we talk about immediate gains, then, yes, Russian propaganda can present this episode with Khamenei’s assassination as (an example of) Western betrayal as in ‘Why can they do it and we can’t?’” Suleymanov said, referring to Khamenei’s assassination and Moscow’s failed attempts to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“In any case, this situation is a blow to Putin’s image, which shows once again that he is incapable of really helping his partners, his allies,” Suleymanov added.
Putin has already lost two key allies. In November 2024, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow and Maduro’s kidnapping in the United States ended Moscow’s alliance with Venezuela.
The Iran war has further ruined the authority of international law, according to a London-based Central Asia expert.
“The main argument against Russian aggression in Ukraine so far has been the gross violation of international law and Ukraine’s sovereignty,” Alisher Ilkhamov, head of the Central Asia Due Diligence think tank, told Al Jazeera.
The Kremlin can also use Khamenei’s assassination as a way to persuade men of fighting age in the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, a country that shares close cultural and linguistic ties with Iran, to fight in Ukraine against an alleged Western “conspiracy” against the broader Muslim community, he said.
And if the war drags on, causing an exodus of Iranian refugees to Europe, far-right parties that often favor Moscow will increase their electoral influence, Ilkhamov said.
