Inside Putin's nightmare scenario

President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is benefiting Russian President Vladimir Putin, even though Putin in theory could and should do much more to protect his Iranian allies.

“Holding Moscow back are the Kremlin’s ongoing negotiations with the Trump administration to end the war in Ukraine,” wrote Foreign Affairs' Alexander Gabuev, Nicole Grajewski, Sergey Vakulenko on Monday. “The Russian leadership hopes to reap benefits from this performative process, at least in terms of limiting U.S. support for Ukraine and slowing the rollout of new sanctions targeting Russia.”

They added, “Under these circumstances, the Kremlin can’t afford to provide stronger, more visible support for Iran.”

This is not to say that Russia’s seeming impotence in the face of a US invasion of its ally is entirely due to Putin's attempts to manipulate Trump. Instead it is “in keeping with a familiar pattern: when Russia’s friends are in need, Moscow issues strongly worded statements and does little else.” They listed as examples Russia’s refusal to intervene in the Armenia-Azerbaijan war of 2023, its refusal to assist Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad against rebels in 2024 and its refusal to interfere when the US abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in 2025. On each occasion, an ostensible Russian ally was left to hang out to dry.

At the same time, “the current war in Iran has unintended consequences that benefit Russia. As the war drags on, the price of energy will likely continue to rise, which will help Moscow earn additional revenue and address a ballooning budget deficit resulting from its war in Ukraine,” Foreign Affairs wrote. In terms of its relationship with the United States, “the war in Iran is yet another distraction for the United States, diverting precious resources and bandwidth that Washington might otherwise have allocated to its European partners and Ukraine. Russia may be unable to protect its partners, but it is still skillful in adapting to strategic failures and reaping important tactical gains from them.”

Additionally, even though Russia is not providing Iran with direct military assistance that could literally prove life-saving, it may be offering secretive assistance in other ways that fly under the radar of the US and do not in other ways disrupt Putin’s other geopolitical goals.

“To be sure, Russia may well be providing assistance that is harder to observe than a weapons shipment, such as offering access to space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance that could improve Iranian targeting,” Foreign Affairs wrote. “Such assistance leaves fewer visible traces than transfers of aircraft or missile batteries, which makes it harder to track and easier to deny, but it is still consequential. Some U.S. administration officials have concluded that Moscow is clandestinely engaged in these activities, as The Washington Post recently reported.”

They added, “The exact scale and depth of this effort is difficult to estimate at this point, but its impact surely pales in comparison to the multiyear, U.S.-led intelligence assistance program that enabled Ukrainian armed forces to kill thousands of Russian soldiers since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022.”

This is not the only wrinkle in the longtime relationship between Trump and Putin. Earlier in March, Reuters reported “when President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, some Russian hardliners were cautiously optimistic, hoping his unpredictability and transactional nature might benefit Moscow on Ukraine. But his attack on Iran means many now see him as a growing threat to Russia itself and are questioning if Trump is the pragmatic, potentially pro-Moscow strongman ready to deal in realpolitik that they thought he was.”

Indeed, nationalist oligarch and Kremlin insider Konstantin Malofeyev told Reuters that “the unprincipled United States is a threat to the entire world. This is the United States we are trying to negotiate with regarding Ukraine. Yes, it wants a weak Europe. But it also wants a weak Russia."

Similarly, The Atlantic published a February article in which senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations Thomas Graham and former Moscow correspondent for The Wall Street Journal Allan Cullison wrote that with Trump “dismantling the order that Putin had so long abhorred,” he believed he would benefit. “Putin had thought he could rise to the top of such a system, in which raw economic and military might outweigh diplomacy and alliances. But he was mistaken: The norms and institutions of the post-War order actually masked Russia's vulnerabilities. Putin has gotten the world he wished for — and it's threatening to crush him."

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