Pavel K. Baev
The Kremlin miscalculated the United States’s readiness to support Israel’s air campaign and underestimated the speed of the ceasefire with Iran, underscoring Russia’s diminishing leverage in Middle Eastern conflicts.
Russia cannot offer Iran tangible aid despite vocal support, pushing Tehran away from Russia for military assistance. This erodes Moscow’s credibility among allies and weakens its strategic presence.
Moscow, sidelined by its limited military and economic tools, is watching its influence recede across Syria, Iran, and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries Plus (OPEC+) structures.
The cessation of hostilities in the Gulf on June 25 was as surprising for Moscow as was Israel’s strike on Iran on June 13. Russia’s attempts to assess the consequences of the surge of the air war have to take into account apparent analytical miscalculations. The most serious errors of judgment pertained to U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to join the Israeli air campaign and the follow-up decision to stop it. Russian experts and officials tended to believe that the U.S. administration had been committed to talks with Iran in the weeks preceding Israel’s shocking first strike, and then tended to emphasize his reluctance to join the war, and presently they prefer to exaggerate the fragility of the ceasefire (Parlamentskaya gazeta; Nezavisimaya gazeta, June 24). This stream of commentary cannot quite hide or deny the crumbling of Russia’s positions in the wider Middle East and the lack of feasible options for regaining influence.
One key proposition in Russian assessments of the new geopolitical configuration in the Middle East is the unshakable stability of the Islamic regime in Iran, which Russian analysts apparently presume to be able to withstand all Israeli and U.S. designs for “regime change” underpinned by the extermination of a score of top commanders of the Revolutionary Guard Corps (RIA Novosti; RBC, June 28). Only a few Russian experts-in-exile—duly labelled as “foreign agents”—argue that the grip on power by the 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has weakened and the depth of discontent in Iran has deepened (Vot-Tak.tv, June 24; The Moscow Times, June 27).
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