CNN
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Just three days before US President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House, Russia and Iran are poised to finally sign a “comprehensive partnership agreement,” a deal months in the making.
It’s a move that will refocus attention on a partnership that has shaped the battlefield in Ukraine and remains committed to challenging the U.S.-led international order — even as the new U.S. administration promises increased engagement with Russia.
Russia and Iran share a complicated past, dotted with conflict, and still today draw a fine line between cooperation and mistrust. And yet, the war in Ukraine has brought Moscow and Tehran closer together.
“This idea of having the United States not just as an adversary but as a strategic objective of their entire foreign policy has brought them together,” said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. tank in Washington, DC, told CNN. “It brought them together on the battlefields of Ukraine.”
In July 2022, five months after beginning his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Tehran, his first wartime trip outside the former Soviet sphere.
Behind the photo ops and handshakes, his “special military operation” was not going as planned. His army had lost much of its initial gains when it was pushed out of the kyiv region – and would lose more later in the year in two more successful Ukrainian counteroffensives.
Recourse to Tehran has borne fruit for Russia. Thanks to an agreement signed following this visit, Russia now produces thousands of Iranian-designed Shahed attack drones at a factory in Tatarstan. A CNN investigation in December found that the plant’s production rates had more than doubled in 2024.
These drones have formed the backbone of Moscow’s war of attrition, en masse – targeting civilian areas and energy infrastructure in an effort to break the resolve of the Ukrainian people and wear down their air defenses.
Russia deployed more than 11,000 to Ukraine last year, according to a CNN tally of Air Force reports, more than four times the estimate of just over 2,500 in 2023 , provided by CNN’s sources in Ukrainian defense intelligence.
Moscow has also, according to the United States, taken delivery of Iranian ballistic missiles – and although no evidence of their alleged deployment has yet surfaced, this news alone has sent a strong signal to Ukraine’s allies indicating that Putin was ready to escalate the situation.
Less desirable for Moscow, it is also a factor that helped shift the debate around allowing Ukraine to fire long-range missiles supplied by the West at military targets in Russia. Several prominent Russian military bloggers claimed in early January, without providing evidence, that Iranian missile launchers and other equipment had been delivered to Russian military training grounds before the deal was signed.
Two and a half years after Putin’s visit to Tehran, the dynamic has changed significantly for both sides. Russia now has the advantage in Ukraine. It gains territory on the Eastern Front and, with the help of North Korean soldiers, slowly pushes Ukraine back into Russia’s Kursk region. The new Trump administration, to Moscow’s barely concealed joy, wants to start talks and is making noise about letting Russia keep the territory it occupies and blocking Ukraine’s application for NATO membership.
Friday’s meeting between Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian also offers Moscow a welcome opportunity to burnish its image as a superpower. Russia views the relationship as “asymmetric,” Jean-Loup Samaan, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told CNN. “They still see themselves as the biggest partner here, and Iran as a regional partner. »
Iran, for its part, feels much less secure. Nikita Smagin, an independent expert on Russia and Iran who worked for Russian state media in Tehran before the invasion of Ukraine, says the Pezeshkian administration is rushing to sign this treaty with the Russia, while its security is threatened.
“They are afraid of the Trump administration, they are afraid of Israel, they are afraid of the collapse of Assad, the collapse of Hezbollah,” he said, explaining that Iran is seeking a show of support.
Moscow could seek to exploit this phenomenon. The Russians have “an excellent nose for someone in trouble,” Alterman said, and perhaps think “we can help them a little bit, but we can get them where we need them and extract more from them than we want.” “.
What Russia still wants is less clear. It has now indigenized Shahed production on Russian soil – and having paid its debt to Iran in an initial franchise deal to make them, it is now doing so with much less direct Iranian involvement.
Russia’s recent advances on the battlefield have come at a heavy cost to its troops. So while its manpower problems are nowhere near Ukraine’s, it could use more troops on the ground. But experts doubt that Iran will be as receptive in this regard as North Korea, which has deployed around 11,000 troops in Russia’s Kursk region, according to Ukrainian and Western assessments.
“Even when Iran fights its wars outside of Iran, it is not willing…to sacrifice its soldiers,” Smagin said, “and when we talk about Iran and Russia, it There is a very deep level of distrust on the part of Iran towards Russia.” And Russia may be wary of any mutual defense deal, given the more immediate threat Israel poses to Iran.
“I think part of this is to send a message to the Trump administration that we each have options,” Alterman said. “I think the Iranians are looking for tools that they can use with the Americans…and there’s a sense that this gives them something to trade or talk about.”
Iran, facing the prospect of a possible reactivation of UN sanctions lifted under its 2015 nuclear deal, is urgently seeking ways to persuade the United States to rejoin the accord, which Trump has left in 2018 – or to relaunch negotiations.
For Russia, a new treaty with Iran – a country that could be closer than ever to the ability to produce a nuclear weapon – could in part serve to raise the specter of further escalation before a new US administration that she considers less committed to Ukraine.
“The Iranians certainly have some concerning capabilities, the Russians have certainly demonstrated a willingness to use some concerning capabilities,” Alterman said.