There is a view that the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war against Iran benefits Russia. The shift of U.S. attention and resources to the Middle East arguably makes it easier for Russian President Vladimir Putin to wage his war in Ukraine. Surging oil prices help enrich the Kremlin’s coffers. Washington’s decision to temporarily lift sanctions on Russian oil is one indication of how Russia stands to win from this new war.

Yet a close look reveals a more complex picture. A more assertive U.S. foreign policy has exposed Russia’s weakness and growing irrelevance. Just as Moscow was unable to save its clients in Syria and, most recently, Venezuela, it is also unable to help Iran. Its global influence in tatters, the Russian regime has been reduced to the role of an onlooker. For all of Putin’s huffing and puffing, Russia is really no more than a regional power, just as U.S. President Barack Obama once averred.

There is a view that the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war against Iran benefits Russia. The shift of U.S. attention and resources to the Middle East arguably makes it easier for Russian President Vladimir Putin to wage his war in Ukraine. Surging oil prices help enrich the Kremlin’s coffers. Washington’s decision to temporarily lift sanctions on Russian oil is one indication of how Russia stands to win from this new war.

Yet a close look reveals a more complex picture. A more assertive U.S. foreign policy has exposed Russia’s weakness and growing irrelevance. Just as Moscow was unable to save its clients in Syria and, most recently, Venezuela, it is also unable to help Iran. Its global influence in tatters, the Russian regime has been reduced to the role of an onlooker. For all of Putin’s huffing and puffing, Russia is really no more than a regional power, just as U.S. President Barack Obama once averred.

Obama infamously backed down before his own red lines in Syria, giving Putin an opportunity to strengthen Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s hold on power and, through Assad, implant himself in the Middle East. U.S. President Donald Trump, by contrast, has given the Iranian regime a run for its money. Putin has offered little but thoughts and prayers for the regime that the Kremlin spent the last 25 years cultivating.

Things looked very different just a few years ago. After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Iran began supplying Russia with Shahed drones, which were promptly put to use against Ukrainian cities. Then, in July 2023, on Russia’s insistence, Iran joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the infamous “dictator’s club” that was originally created as a forum for aligning China’s and Russia’s interests in Central Asia but has more recently become something of a prototype anti-liberal bloc of revisionist powers.

In January 2025, Russia and Iran signed a strategic partnership agreement. While this agreement does not contain a mutual defense clause, making it distinctly different from, for example, the Russian-North Korean defense treaty, both Moscow and Tehran spoke enthusiastically about deepening ties. Nor were they alone. In an April 2024 Foreign Affairs article, Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine coined a new term—the axis of upheaval—to highlight how Russia and Iran, alongside China and North Korea, worked together, with a shared purpose, to erode the foundations of the rules-based international order.

If this is what they were doing, then perhaps they richly deserved what followed—a U.S. war in the Middle East that does not remotely follow any rules except for the one known to the Athenian generals at Melos: The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

It’s that aspect—the blatant, unapologetic use of force against adversaries—that has rattled the Kremlin the most. Putin previously invented elaborate excuses for his war against Ukraine and had historically relied on false-flag operations to confuse public opinion and deflect blame for aggression. But Trump is averse to such cowardly tactics. He decided to do something and then just did it—brutally but, in a way, quite honestly.

The Russian officialdom issued statements of concern. In an unconvincing effort at commiseration, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke to his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, and the two countries brought up the matter at the United Nations Security Council—to no effect whatsoever. The SCO that so warmly welcomed Iran as a member lowered the flag over its Beijing headquarters to half-mast, to mourn the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Where Kremlin officials held their tongues, Russia’s expert community expressed frank bewilderment. Leonid Reshetnikov, a retired general of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, argued, unironically, that the U.S. attack showed that “there are no more rules.” Fyodor Lukyanov, a longtime foreign affairs commentator, noted how “appealing to international law, which, in theory, is at the source of all diplomacy, is [now] pointless.”

Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Ministry has tried to stay relevant by readvertising long-defunct proposals for collective security in the Middle East. In the practice of Russian foreign policy, such proposals have often served a specific role: They’ve helped secure Moscow a seat at the table in conflicts that do not otherwise require Russian presence or assistance. Yet, in a part of the world that respects force, Moscow’s diplomatic proposals have floated like a lead balloon.

There have been reports that Russia has supplied Iran with targeting data for its strikes on U.S. assets in the region. If true, such secret cooperation would represent Moscow’s important, tangible contribution to Iranian military capabilities. However, any such contribution should not be overstated: It may just be a bargaining chip, which the Kremlin is desperately hoping to cash in so Washington will stop providing targeting data to Ukraine.

Thus, Putin’s current strategy is to anxiously eye the war in the Middle East, hoping that the United States gets stuck there in some kind of a quagmire. The benefits of a quagmire are self-evident. In addition to humiliating Trump, the failure of Operation Epic Fury would create tensions within NATO and U.S. regional alliances and keep oil prices at a profitably elevated level. The longer such a conflict continues, the better for the Kremlin’s account books. Yet it would be a mistake to think that short-term gains from higher oil prices are all that matters to Putin. There are more important issues at stake.

Indeed, if, after having significantly degraded Iran’s capabilities, the United States reached a compromise with the Iranian regime, its standing in the Middle East would soar, while Russia and China would have been exposed as paper tigers that are much better at talking about a new world order than putting their ambitious visions into practice.

In that case, judgment is still out. Nothing weakened the United States quite as much as 20 years of open-ended conflict in the Middle East. Not only did America’s wars create opportunities for Russia to project power in the region, but its botched withdrawal from Afghanistan emboldened Putin to test U.S. credibility by invading Ukraine.

But a short war, if it ends with what could reasonably be interpreted as U.S. victory—even if this left the battered Iranian regime in place—would strengthen U.S. credibility and further erode Russia’s. A successful operation against Iran would stand in stark contrast to Russia’s own slog of a “special military operation” in Ukraine, which, after unleashing terrible destruction and wasting hundreds of thousands of lives, has notably failed to achieve any of its original objectives.

In sum, whether Russia benefits from this war or not all depends on how, and how quickly, it ends. All Putin can do is impotently watch Washington’s war effort and hope for the worst.