Moscow for decades has been Iran’s main international backer, shielding it from United Nations resolutions while trying to soften Western sanctions and selling weaponry worth billions of dollars to Tehran.
Russian President Vladimir Putin lambasted the killing on Saturday of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as a “cynical violation of all norms of human morals and the international law”.
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Putin’s former prime minister and one-time successor Dmitry Medvedev sardonically called United States President Donald Trump a “peacekeeper who showed his real face”.
Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Federal Assembly, compared the war to what he alleged were the collective West’s attempts to destabilise Russia in the 1990s, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said US-Iranian talks about Tehran’s nuclear programme “degraded to direct aggression”.
But as US and Israeli air strikes on Iran raged on for a fourth day on Tuesday, Russia appeared poised to benefit far more from the war than it looked to lose.
Moscow’s most immediate gain is a boost in its oil revenues.
The price of Russia’s Urals crude plunged to a new low in late February at $40 per barrel because of deep discounts caused by Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine.
But as the price of the international benchmark Brent crude jumped by 13 percent by Monday, reaching $82 per barrel, Urals was traded at $57.
‘Russian oil will be sought after’
Russia, Iran and Venezuela are the world’s top producers of heavy crude that is exported to dozens of nations to be processed by their refineries.
Venezuela’s exports stalled after US special forces captured President Nicolas Maduro on January 3 and the White House gained control of Caracas’s oil trade.
The suspension of Iran’s exports means that oil refineries designed to process heavy crude will have to rely on the Urals oil from Russia.
“It means that Russian oil will be sought after because the rebuilding of technological processes of oil refineries takes long and costs a lot,” Igar Tyshkevych, a political analyst based in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, told Al Jazeera. “It means that the discounts for Russian oil will change.”
If oil prices rise further, the Kremlin may propose to increase supply in exchange for Washington’s decision to partially lift the sanctions.
Russia’s higher oil production would decrease petrol prices in the US before the midterm elections in November, he said.
A second, longer-term gain could be Moscow’s attempt to act as a mediator in peace talks between Tehran and Washington.
“It has been tried several times during conflicts between the US and Iran,” Tyshkevych said. “It didn’t always work, but Russia can try.”
In March 2025, Putin offered to mediate US-Iranian negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear programme and three months later repeated the proposal while US and Israeli strikes were hitting Iran during a 12-day war.
Washington ignored its offer both times.
The conflicts with Iran have distracted Trump from trying to reach a US-brokered settlement of the Russia-Ukraine war, which entered its fifth year on February 24.
The talks have stalled as Moscow has kept urging Ukraine to leave the Kyiv-controlled part of the Donetsk region in southeastern Ukraine.
Washington will continue pressing both sides to settle, turning the talks into a “who blinks first” game, Tyshkevych said.
“No one wants to say ‘no’ first but tries to create conditions for the opponent to loudly say ‘no’ and slam the door loudly,” he said.
And as the attention of Washington and other Western powers is turned towards the war in Iran, Russia gets several weeks to come up with a new agenda for Trump, he said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine could face a shortage of US-supplied missiles for Patriot air defence systems, which can shoot down Russian ballistic missiles, analysts warned.
Patriot missiles are being redirected to 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 only get worse,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of the Ukrainian military’s General Staff, told Al Jazeera.
Patriot missiles “are manufactured in very low numbers. Americans have tried to change it, but with such demand, it can’t be done fast,” he said.
However, Putin faces a tough choice between Washington and Tehran, according to a Russian expert on Iran.
“Moscow has to choose, and for Putin, it’s a very tough choice because on the one hand, he doesn’t want to have a falling-out with Trump, but on the other hand, the regime in Tehran is one of the few serious foreign partners for the Kremlin for now,” Ruslan Suleymanov, an associate fellow at the New Eurasian Strategies Center, a US-British think tank, told Al Jazeera.
“Besides, there is the heaviest choice between Iran and Israel,” he said.
The Kremlin has tried to maintain a pragmatic partnership with Israel.
“If we’re talking about immediate gains, then, yes, Russian propaganda can spin this episode with the killing of Khamenei as [an example of] Western treachery as in ‘Why can they do it and we can’t,’” Suleymanov said, referring to Khamenei’s killing and Moscow’s failed attempts to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“In any case, this situation is a blow to Putin’s image that yet again shows 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 abduction to the United States put an end to Moscow’s alliance with Venezuela.
The Iran war has further ruined the authority of international law, according to a London-based expert on Central Asia.
“The main argument against the Russian aggression in Ukraine so far has been the rude violation of international law and Ukraine’s sovereignty,” Alisher Ilkhamov, head of the Central Asia Due Diligence think tank, told Al Jazeera.
The Kremlin may also use Khamenei’s killing 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 wider Muslim community, he said.
And if the war drags on, triggering an exodus of Iranian refugees to Europe, far-right parties that often favour Moscow will increase their electoral clout, Ilkhamov said.
