Russia and Iran’s Evolving Relationship
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This is CNA Talks, the flagship podcast of CNA, a Washington, D.C.-based research and analysis organization. Since the early days of the Ukraine war, Iran has been providing weapons to Russia. These supplies have included drones, artillery shells, and even ballistic missiles. The relationship between Iran and Russia has evolved dramatically over the last decade.

when Russia worked with the United States as a signature of the Iran nuclear deal. In this episode, we examine this evolution and what we can expect from the relationship in the future. Welcome to CNA Talks. I'm John Stimson.

Today, we'll be discussing the CNA report, "The Evolving Russia-Iran Relationship," and I'm excited to welcome two of its authors to the show, Drs. Julian Waller and Elizabeth Wisnik from our Russia Studies and China Studies programs, respectively. Thank you both for being here. Thank you. Thanks very much for having us. Absolutely. Excited to talk about your research. So what inspired this research? How did it come about?

Sure, yeah, it's a great question. So this research, which is centered in CNA's Strategy, Policy, Plans, and Programs Division, within which the Russia Studies Program sits, and which the China Studies Program often interacts with directly. This particular report was sponsored by European Command's Russian Strategic Initiative.

which funds a lot of basic research on the Russian Armed Forces, Russian foreign policy, bilateral relationship, strategic elite decision-making. And given the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and the rather major changes to the overall geopolitical alignment globally, the strategic operating picture in general, they were very, very interested in

in an assessment overall of the Russia-Iran relationship and how it's changed, especially since the 2022 immediate Russian invasion of Ukraine, but also generally how it's changed in the last decade or so. And to that end, they didn't want just a report on Russia's approach to Iran, but wanted the full bilateral relationship.

Overall, we introduced a specific methodological approach, engaged in a lot of background research, and put together what I think is a very interesting and compelling report that complements a lot of other think tank and FFRDC research related to this important question.

Elizabeth, anything you want to add? Yeah, it was exciting to work on this report because it was really a developing story. So as we were writing the report, there was new information about the collaboration in drone production between Iran and Russia. A strategic partnership agreement was being negotiated and there were ongoing military exercises and engagements between the two countries. So it was very interesting.

interesting to follow an unfolding relationship in real time. So let's understand the background of the Russia-Iran relationship. I want to understand how we got from Russia working with Western powers as a signature of the Iran nuclear deal to now working closely with Iran and how things have shifted in that regard. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Sure, absolutely. Well, it's very interesting because the Russia-Iran relationship has traditionally characterized as hesitant cooperation, on and off cooperation, as well as competition and friendship, not least on the nuclear aspect that you mentioned. What we find is

is that there are two major inflection points that add to the evolution of the Russia-Iran relationship from one of tenuous cooperation, partial cooperation, to a much more full-fledged and deeper evolution of the relationship. The first is cooperation during the Syrian Civil War in 2015, in which Russia and Iran developed considerably closer military-to-military ties based on the need to coordinate operations on the ground in

Support of the regime. And this included integrated groupings of irregular armed forces under the command of the Russian armed forces, liaison elements of the Syrian intelligence, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC on the Iranian side, Hezbollah, and so on and so forth. They required a lot of military to military connections.

What's very interesting is that this is happening in the background of the much more constrained nuclear situation, right? The COA and these attempts to halt further development around nuclear program. Russia has traditionally viewed Iran as a country that does not want to get nuclear weapons. And so you end up having this kind of interesting dichotomy. But nevertheless, the period of the war, these are major touch points on the military relationship

But on other aspects of the relationship, it was still sort of tentative, still sort of partial. And so that

lead up, brings us to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, followed immediately by the Western imposed sanctions regime, which is intended to be global, which made Russia's economic life much more difficult, made its access to technology much more difficult. And that's going to ultimately spur a full rapprochement between Russia and Iran as sort of aligning

for the purposes of wartime exigencies against the West. And suddenly, many of the concerns and suspicions on the Russian side were put to the side, more or less, de facto, and the relationship has allowed to expand considerably.

I want to hit the nail on the head about one thing you brought up right away there, which is this idea that like Russia is not in Russia's interest for more countries to become nuclear powers. And of course, that makes a lot of sense. They're one of the two largest nuclear powers in the world. So in some senses, while it happened that the United States and the West and Russia shared an interest when it came to the original Iran nuclear deal, it wasn't necessarily so much that they were working together as like, you know,

cooperative allies as it was that they had this set of shared interests that they were able to cooperate around. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And one important aspect when we think about bilateral relationships in the international stage is that they often cannot be characterized along a single dimension or a single issue area, right? They're quite diverse and there's varying speeds of cooperation or contestation, degrees of deepening or degrees of sort of reticence, levels and limitations of the touch points between the two sides.

And what you find is that if the Russia-Iran relationship is much more so a military-to-military relationship in the 2010s, we also see at the same time Vladimir Putin allowing the S-300s to be delivered again and new arms agreements. With the Ukraine war, you can have a much more holistic overall increase in the relationship across a variety of dimensions. That's something that our report really highlights.

And it also shows that even though we can say, in general terms, the relationship has increased in closeness, that actually doesn't mean that everything has increased in all ways. There are still elements and aspects of the relationship which are relatively limited.

Another aspect of our report is we look at internal and external factors and how they impact the Russia-Iran relationship. And one of the external factors that was very significant was the collapse of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, which enabled a further rapprochement between Russia and Iran. This is in the context

of sanctions imposed on Russia due to the annexation of Crimea and the intervention in eastern Ukraine. And then the UN arms embargo against Iran expired in 2020. So this paved the way for closer military cooperation between the two countries.

So moving into the present and let's talk about the different areas of cooperation between Russia and Iran. Your report outlines three different areas and defines them as military, political and economic.

Elizabeth, maybe you can start by telling us about the military dimension of this relationship. This is an interesting story to recount, is we probably all don't remember that Iran used to be a partner of the United States before the fall of the Shah. So the military relationship between Russia and Iran is relatively recent. It dates to the 1990s.

But during the 1990s, it was fairly limited. And in fact, Yeltsin had imposed a ban on military sales at one point. So when Putin takes office, that's when the military relationship begins to move forward.

Nonetheless, as we talked about, the imposition of UN arms embargo and the Iran nuclear deal led to some constraints in the 2010s as well. But we have seen since the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a real acceleration of this relationship.

in many ways. We've seen a series of high level exchanges that finally led to the signing of a strategic partnership agreement between the two countries just this January of 2025.

This was a long-awaited agreement, and it seems to codify the existing relationship rather than breaking new ground. There's no mutual defense clause, for example. But relations have accelerated because of the conflict in Syria and also the war in Ukraine. And so we see different aspects of military cooperation in these two different conflicts.

In Syria, we saw some combined operations going on where the Russian military provided weapons to the Assad forces. We saw an intelligence center set up in Iraq that involved Iran and Syria. Russian support for Hezbollah and allegedly also to some extent for Hamas, so Iranian proxies.

In Ukraine, after 2022, that's where you really see a lot more happening on the military side of things in terms of sales by Iran of ammunition and shells, also short-range missiles. And you have sales of drones and actual co-production of drones inside Russia for the conflict in Ukraine.

And all this military aid is happening in contravention of sanctions. And we established in this report that the one mechanism was through what's known as dark port calls, where ships come from Iran across the Caspian Sea to Russia. They turn off their transponders so you can identify the vessel. And then these ships go to Astrakhan in Russia and then up the Volga-Dorn Canal, which previously had been closed to foreign ships.

And so we can establish a pattern of

of transit by these ships that provide these weapons to Russia for Ukraine. So the question is, where will this lead to? There was a report that Iran finalized a purchase of Su-35 aircraft from Russia, but we're still not sure if they're actually in Iran yet. So the two conflicts really move the military partnership forward. It's unclear where it goes from there.

Can you elaborate a little bit on this joint production of drones that you mentioned? That seems pretty interesting. I hadn't heard about that before. Yeah, so drones have been a very important aspect of the war in Ukraine, as the Russia program at CNA has documented in great detail in multiple different ways. So Iran is a part of this piece. So Iran was selling its own drones, three kinds of drones,

and because of the high demand for it, began producing them inside Russia. This is one of the more significant aspects of their collaboration, where you have Iran supporting the production of a weapon system for Ukraine inside Russia. Julian, anything you'd like to add? If we just go to the big, grand characterization, we get the general uptick in relationship in a considerable way. And if we see the material material

in terms of drones and other arms sales. Obviously, it's quite extensive, but there really are a wide variety and a great amount of diversity in the degree of the military-to-military relationship. Some areas are really not experiencing the same level of uptick. We can see that. There's limits to how far they want to go, not only for international relations reasons, foreign policy reasons, but also due to domestic constituencies.

that remain sufficient, that care a lot more about questions of sovereignty. The military base is one very, very good example of that. And that's something to keep in mind as we can run through all the different dimensions and aspects of this relationship. Speaking of, let's move on to the political dimension. Julian, can you tell us about that?

Sure, yeah. So like the military dimension, the political dimension is expanded and extended and deepens. Interestingly enough, the report was finalized before the strategic partnership was signed, right, which is quite recent. And so we actually have that code of this sort of a median relationship characterization, and now it's...

higher events have continued to pace forward. But in general, there is increasing geopolitical alignment between Russia and Iran. And it's not only in terms of elite interactions, although those are very important, but it's also in terms of rhetoric, right, and sort of ideological alignment between the two countries. So for example, we find

that on both the Iranian and the Russian side, there's a reliance on civilizationist illiberal rhetoric, counterposed vis-a-vis the perceived hegemony of the liberal left, the liberal global order. Both leadership elites are very, very keen on expressing their unity against this.

Doing so not just in pure military or instrumental terms, but in terms of values and norms. And this has increased over time. In fact, while the Iranian regime has always had this very strong ideological opposition, in Russia it's grown significantly.

since Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency in 2012, and then after the war began, there's been a true uptick. You now have President Putin constantly talking about Russia as a civilization state in opposition to the West, aligned against the West, acting as a leader of the so-called global South against American hegemony, Western hegemony. This aligned quite well with the Iranian way of

discussing global politics and sort of its broad general dynamics. So that's sort of, in a high-level sense, we see this greater alignment. And rhetorical alignment is, of course, important because it can further a sense of mutual interest and trust across elites who are also increasingly meeting year on year on both sides of this bilateral relationship.

they're starting to speak more of the same language, which is very helpful for the medium-term and long-term trajectory of this relationship. And in more concrete ways as well, we see an uptick in memoranda of understanding signed between the two countries, going from sort of three signed in 2022 to 21 signed in 2024. Then that's just public memoranda of understanding. These, of course, suggest a variety of issue areas from countries

economic cooperation, to military technical cooperation, to other issues that are being engaged upon. And MOUs, Memorandum of Understanding, are important because they spur the bureaucracy, the administrations in each of these countries, to start engaging not only at the high key elite level, but at lower levels as well.

where you have to develop commissions and you have parliamentary exchanges and so on and so forth. Again, do you have these high-level political elites as well as bureaucratic elites interacting with each other

more and more and more on very, very particular issues. In addition to memorandum of understanding, we also have a major uptick in joint statements also occurring over the same time period. And then overall, of course, we have a major key leader engagement, right? Engagements from major political elites on both sides. And something we point out in the report, and this gets to the discussion of the military side of things, and sort of what we might call the military-political or the political-military dimension of

which is sort of an overlapping terrain, is increasing interaction between both countries' security councils. And the Russian Security Council

The Iranian National Security Council are powerful institutions. In Russia, the Security Council is sort of this conciliar body, in some ways, sort of an official privy council, subordinate directly to the Russian president, which provides advice as well as develops major concepts, foreign policy concepts, security concepts, and so on. These are very, very important elites. They're not your

bureaucrats only, and they often represent key elements of Russia's authoritarian regime. The touchpoint between each other's security councils has grown tremendously.

just over the last couple of years. Similarly, though, connections between their respective chief of staff, other of their militaries also have increased in Iran. The whole thing is just a lot more connection and touch points between key elites in these two very, very highly authoritarian, although very differently authoritarian countries. You know, I understand that there to be a lot of like factionalization in Iran, where you have what's often described as like moderates and hardliners.

And, you know, that may be an oversimplification, but does this increased political interaction that you're seeing between the two countries, is that across this factionalization or is it is this unity more popular with one faction than with another? That's a great question. I think that different factions have different degrees of engagement with Russia.

the moderates seem to be the least enthusiastic about Russia and want to have more options in terms of engaging with the international community. And granted, that's not very possible at the moment because of the nuclear issue and its lack of resolution. But

But there's a feeling that by drawing too close to Russia, that Iran cuts off some avenues for the future among the moderate circles. And then you have groups like the Revolutionary Guards that have benefited from Russian support for Iranian proxies in the Middle East.

But for Russia, I think this also creates some tradeoffs. For example, to the extent that Russia draws closer to Iran, this causes problems for Russia and Saudi Arabia, which Russia has also been trying to engage with and other Gulf states.

And also Israel had been a fairly good partner for Russia until the Hamas-Israel war of last year. And that really led to a deterioration in Russia's relations with Israel. So I think Russia also has to balance some of its goals with respect to Iran for its overall foreign policy goals in the region.

The only thing I would add is that in these states, as in most states, there are sections of the upper tier political elite, as well as the lower tier loyalist elite that sort of support and undergird and subordinate political institutions that don't care all that much about foreign policy.

Right. It's not every elite in either country is constantly thinking about the Russia relationship or the Iran relationship in their respective countries. So, for example, military elites in Russia are in general gung ho with the relationship, not least because they're gaining direct benefits on the battlefield. Right. Right. In terms of material. Similarly, more for moral, cultural benefits.

elites in Russia, coming from the Orthodox Church, for example, or influenced by it, are of, in some ways, mixed views. On the one hand, that strong illiberal alignment and civilizational alignment works quite well. And you do see a very strong effort to not criticize Iran in any way, shape, or form in that sense. So they're quite interested. On the other hand, of course, the Iranian theocracy is quite different

from Russia's own civilizational illiberalism and its own orthodox background. And so while we don't see the tensions expressed publicly, they could, of course, reemerge at some point, or they could provide a degree of limitation. That being said, it's also difficult to fully grasp how

internal factions in each of these authoritarian regimes see each other. What we can see is the observable key elites in official position interacting with each other. And in that case, it is both a high frequency of interactions, right? We see it quite often. We see it more and more and more, which is a sign of willing to let the factional concerns be at bay, right?

And also just in a general sense of the warmness of the interest, what the other side has to say and how they can contribute to the relationship. So both of these countries' factional politics are to some degree opaque, and they also are going to vary quite strongly across institutions. Got it. And I think that's important to note that while Russia maybe appears from the outside as this unitary power with Putin at the top of it, there is a lot of factionalization within Russia as well.

That's exactly right. But finally, the last dimension of your report lays out is the economic dimension. Elizabeth, maybe you can get into that a little bit. The economic side has many of the same dynamics as the military sector we spoke about before. And we see an alternation of engagement and withdrawal. So when sanctions were in place,

as a part of the Iran nuclear agreement, that set some limits to economic collaboration between the two. But when sanctions were removed, that created more opportunities for the two countries to engage. And we see in particular after 2022 that

There's much more of a development in the economic relations between the two countries. So sanctions were no longer a deterrent and Russia was looking for new partners to avoid isolation and to engage more with the global south and also more broadly in terms of a look east policy that Russia was trying to implement.

So both Iran and Russia began using their national currencies to settle accounts. And there was a kind of bilateral de-dollarization move there to avoid the sanctions on payment mechanisms that had been imposed on both of them. They signed a free trade agreement in 2023, although this has yet to really be implemented.

But nonetheless, trade has increased since 2022 and Russia has begun purchasing industrial goods from Iran for the first time and also investing more in Iran, including in the energy sector. And that's really interesting because before the war in Ukraine, the two were competing for the European market in terms of sending energy to Europe.

And now that Russia is sending much less, just gas and not oil, and Iran is no longer seen as the same kind of competitor in that way.

We have seen Russia investing in Iran's energy sector. So that's been interesting. There's also a plan afoot to create an international north-south transport corridor that would go from Russia south through the Caucasus to Iran and then to India.

And so that's different dynamic than the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, which is West-East, and in some respects would compete with that initiative and also bring in India, which is a competitor of China's. So that's definitely a storyline to watch in the future. Absolutely. And there's been a lot of change and evolution going on, and I can see why you titled your report as you did.

So I wanted to see, based on any recent developments that we've seen in the news, if there's anything you would want to add at this point. It's a great question. Things are obviously moving quite rapidly. So far, the report has held up quite well, right? We noticed this continued general increase in pies. We do notice the pattern of...

some degree of suspicion, some degree of diversity in what exactly is increasing versus what is staying the same. And of course, as we mentioned earlier, the strategic partnership, which was recently signed, suggests, again, it's not as deep of a relationship as, say, the Russian-North Korea relationship seems to be, but nevertheless, it is underlining and undergirding the overall increase across all of these dimensions. In terms of specific...

points of interest. The sudden collapse of the Syrian regime, this winter, has actually proved to be a very, very interesting case. It's obviously ongoing, so all of this is somewhat preliminary, but the Assad regime was supported, of course, by both sides, and

In the wake of that sudden collapse, which was more or less glad to happen, Russia was not interested in further bolstering Assad when the writing seemed to be very much so on the wall, for example, and similar to Iran. What we see are parallel tracks so far of trying to cope with the new reality on the ground. So, for example, Russia is quite interested in ensuring the security of its cordon tardis,

It's interested, as far as we can tell, and at least trying to maintain perhaps the airport and command post in Khmeimim, insofar as that's possible, as well as generally focused geographically on the Syrian coastline area and engaging with the new regime. And a lot of that remains under wrap. It's not public consumption per se. We don't know the full Russian policy.

But nevertheless, Russian policy is quite distinct from the Iranian position, which is looking to rebuild ties across all the militia elements that it had connections to, rebuild ways to connect against the law.

and other aspects, then perhaps Iran is still deciding on how it wants to treat the new Syrian regime. There's a lot of sort of moving parts, and we don't know how it's all going to shake out. But what we noticed is that there is not overt cooperation on the Russian or Iranian side in order to sort of coordinate a singular response to a regime collapse. But they're also not trying to get in each other's way, at least not so far.

And again, this is something that we're watching, we're tracking, we're interested in, because it's very much a test case. When do the interests intersect? When do they diverge? And to what degree are both sides cognizant of trying to not upset the other, for example, as the new reality on the ground in Syria unfolds? So I think that's something of interest to watch and

I know we're watching my colleague Mike McConnell is also quite interested in that, who's one of our Iran specialists and is an author of the report as well. We actually had Mike on the podcast in January to talk about a lot of that. So if that's something you're interested in and you haven't listened to that episode yet, that'll be in the show notes.

But Elizabeth, what about you? Anything you'd like to add? Yeah, so I'll echo what Julian said. I think the report really has held up well to the recent events. And one of them was a trilateral naval drill by China, Iran and Russia. So we do talk in the report about the series of bilateral and multilateral exercises that Russia and Iran have been involved with. And the multilateral have involved China.

And so when people observe this, they immediately jump to the conclusion that there must be a trilateral axis emerging among the three because Iran and Russia have a strategic partnership just signed. Iran and China signed a strategic partnership in 2021.

But the reality is a little bit more complicated. And we talk about that in the report a bit. I also recently gave some testimony to the U.S.-China Economics and Security Review Commission on that. I think China and Iran have their areas of difference, too. The strategic partnership that they signed took a long time to complete. There is concern in Iran about the dominance of China economically.

China has been interested in Iran as an energy supplier, even though it doesn't report

imports from Iran on its trade figures, because that would be a violation of sanctions. 10% of China's oil imports actually come from Iran. And it's its fourth largest supplier, but it comes to China indirectly through Malaysia and other places. So it's

There's a complicated partnership between China and Iran, just as between Russia and Iran. And we saw the three of them convening in Beijing to call for an end to U.S. sanctions Iran over its nuclear program.

And so in certain areas, they do have parallel interests. But to my mind, that does not indicate that they're coordinating their foreign policies. I think the value of the report like this one is to get into the weeds of the different aspects of the bilateral relations involved.

And that template that Julian was talking about shows exactly where the strengths and weaknesses and the different aspects of the partnership between Russia and Iran, military, political, economic, so that you can really judge how this relationship is evolving. I think if we did the same for China and Iran, we would see that there are also some problematic aspects and weak points and some strengths.

So I think this is an evolving story. We're going to see more China, Russia, Iran interactions, but I don't think we should jump to conclusions about what this means for some kind of trilateral axis. I think anytime you have nation states this large, there's going to be complexities and factions. And, you know, it's very easy to think of these states as monoliths in the abstract, but the kind of nuance that you're describing is exactly why organizations like CNA and the Work

we do are so vital to actually getting a good picture of what these relationships look like in their full picture. Yeah, that's certainly very true. And it was so interesting to work on this report because of all the complexities that we unraveled in the process. All right. Well, we're just about out of time, but thank you both so much for coming on. I've learned a lot. This has been a really interesting discussion. Thank you, John. It was a pleasure to be a part of it. Yeah, absolutely. This was wonderful as usual.

For our listeners, the report is The Evolving Russia-Iran Relationship. There'll be a link to that in the show notes of this episode, as well as links to both Elizabeth and Julian's programs. So you can explore all the work that CNA is doing on a variety of different topics. We'll also have a link to that podcast I mentioned if you're interested in learning more about the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. But I want to thank you all so much for listening. And we'll see you next time on CNA Talks.

Thanks for listening to CNA Talks. The views expressed are those of the commentators and do not necessarily reflect those of CNA or any of its sponsors. CNA Talks is produced, edited, and mixed by John Stimson. Our theme music is by Edward Granga. If you enjoy our show, we'd love it if you could give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends about us. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you in two weeks. ♪