Could Russia support US-Iran negotiations? The risks outweigh the benefits.

The following article is one of a two-part series of essays assessing the relative benefits and risks of inviting Russia into ongoing US-Iranian talks. The companion piece offering a contrasting view can be found here.
 

President Donald Trump wants a deal with Iran. Russia has offered to mediate. But an agreement negotiated by Moscow would turn the Middle East upside down as well as negate years of Western efforts to impede and deter further aggression by the Kremlin.

The temptation to take the Kremlin up on its offer

Trump’s love for deals is no secret. Moscow is keen to oblige and has repeatedly offered to mediate directly between Washington and Tehran in recent months. The first round of renewed talks between the US and Iran on the latter’s nuclear program took place in Muscat, Oman. Russia had no representatives at that meeting. But Trump’s chief negotiator, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, notably flew there from Moscow, where he had been conducting separate bilateral discussions with his hosts on Russia’s war against Ukraine. In turn, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who headed the Iranian delegation in Oman, visited the Russian capital this week ahead of the next round of talks with the Americans, which will take place in Rome this Saturday. And just as tellingly, a few days before the US-Iranian meeting in Muscat, officials from Iran, Russia, and China all conferred in Moscow. Russia clearly already has its oar in the water.

It makes sense in theory for the American side to consider Russia’s offer to involve itself in the US-Iranian talks. President Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, have a good relationship. As do Putin and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It also helps that, Moscow’s close ties to Tehran notwithstanding, Russian officials have repeatedly spoken on the record against the Iranian regime acquiring its own nuclear weapons capability. Moreover, in a recent phone call between Putin and Trump, the two sides concluded that Iran should never have the capacity to destroy Israel.

Letting the fox into the henhouse

Optimists beware, however. Moscow as mediator could critically undermine the interests of the US and the wider West by bolstering Iran’s negotiating position, opening the talks up to a bad-faith actor, and potentially freeing Russia from the constraints the Western community had sought to apply since the large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

First of all, Russia is not a neutral or disinterested party; it has a number of overlapping interests with Iran, including the rolling back of international sanctions. Notably, the Russian government openly opposes President Trump’s approach of “maximal pressure” on Iran. “Threats [from the US against Iran] are indeed heard, and ultimatums are heard. We consider such methods inappropriate, we condemn them,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, who is responsible for relations with both Iran and the US, said recently.  Even more importantly, Russia and Iran are together pursuing an agenda fundamentally at odds with American objectives in the Middle East and beyond. For years, both have shown steady commitment to overturning the US-led, rules-based international order.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been aided and abetted by Iran since at least fall 2022, when reports first emerged about Russian forces utilizing Iranian attack drones to target Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. And it bears underscoring that Russia, one of the most sanctioned countries on earth (largely because of the Ukraine war), has cooperated with Iran, another leading contender for the title, on developing sanctions evasion “best practices.”

On Jan. 17, Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed the Iran-Russia Comprehensive Strategic Partnership agreement. The Institute for the Study of War argues that joint activities between Russia and Iran have deepened in recent years across seven strategic domains: arms transfers, defense industrial base integration, technical cooperation and knowledge transfer, joint military exercises, as well as economic, political, diplomatic, media, and information space cooperation.

In the Middle East, Russia has been a vital supporter of Iran’s proxies. In November 2024, Israel discovered in southern Lebanon large troves of weapons apparently provided to Hezbollah by the Kremlin, which Israel is now reportedly transferring to Ukraine. In the case of Hamas, the Israel Defense Forces found Russian-made arms in Gaza, and according to Ukraine’s intelligence services, Moscow supplied the militant group with captured Ukrainian weapons in an effort to discredit Kyiv. At the beginning of this month, the US imposed sanctions on a Houthi operatives network for procuring weapons and goods from Russia. Back in October, The Wall Street Journal reported that Russia provided targeting information for the Houthis to attack West-bound civilian ships in and around the Red Sea.

US intelligence agencies warn that Russia, China, and Iran are cooperating to an unprecedented extent against the United States. Tehran has become one of the most important military suppliers of Russia, providing drones and other weapons, but also intelligence and cyber capabilities. China has emerged as a key supporter of both Russia’s and Iran’s economies, buying large amounts of oil. On April 16, the US imposed sanctions on Chinese refineries, accusing Beijing of illegally buying $1 billion worth of oil with the aid of Iran’s “shadow fleet.”

The latest annual threat assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence points to a Russia “resolved and prepared to pay a very high price to prevail in what [Putin] sees as a defining time in Russia’s strategic competition with the United States.” Moscow continues to offer Tehran military and technical support to advance Iranian weapons, intelligence, and cyber capabilities.

Asking a bad-faith player to fairly manage negotiations

Russia is already engaged in high-stakes negotiations with the United States on ending the fighting in Ukraine. But Moscow’s diplomatic goals in these talks are to evade all responsibility for igniting the largest land war in Europe in 70 years and lock in the fruits of its military aggression. As a matter of course, Russian diplomacy makes maximalist demands but then reneges on whatever it agreed to. It shows itself time and again to be the master of bad faith and brutality.

So far, Russia has proven adept at securing and pocketing multiple concessions from the Trump administration while slow-rolling or ignoring the pledges it has made in return — in the meantime, continuing to push for further battlefield gains in Ukraine. Its diplomatic strategy is undergirded by the unique rapport Putin has managed to build up with Trump, which the Kremlin leader has been able to exploit. Trump has often shown an openness to accommodating Putin as well as repeating Russian talking points or disinformation. In recent months, this has undermined continued US support for Ukraine as well as provided more breathing room for Russia. Putin would surely try to pursue the same approach with regard to Iran talks.

On the Ukraine war talks, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent remarks demonstrate that the US is losing patience with the Russian side. It seems highly unlikely that Russia would constructively help America in the Middle East as it humiliates the United States in Eastern Europe and continues to drag its feet over peace with Ukraine. After every major meeting of US and Russian officials to date, both sides expressed optimism about progress and Russia’s purported openness to concluding the war. Yet the Russian invasion proceeds unabated. On April 13, a Russian missile attack struck the inner city of Sumy in northeastern Ukraine as people were gathering for Palm Sunday church services. The assault killed 35 civilians and injured more than 100. This is not the first time the Kremlin has tried to humiliate the White House. Indeed, Russia keeps ignoring the US proposal for a “full and unconditional cease-fire.”

An opening for Russia’s return to the Middle East

When it comes to ensuring that the outcome of US-Iranian talks leaves the regime in Tehran unscathed, President Putin has skin in the game. It is no secret he wants to expand Russia’s influence in the Middle East. The Kremlin’s continued ability to cooperate with Iran is a critical component of this strategy, particularly since the loss of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria was a setback for both the Russians and the Iranians.

For decades, Moscow has strived to obtain and secure access to warm waters and trade routes — the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, and beyond. After annexing Crimea in 2014, Putin moved swiftly. He used the peninsula as a base from which to project military power into the Middle East. Without Crimea, the intervention into Syria in 2015 — at the request of Iran — would not have been sustainable. In return for saving Assad, the Russian military secured long-term rights to naval and air bases on Syrian territory. The Kremlin’s expanded position in Syria was then used to project power into Libya. Putin subsequently used his standing in Syria and Libya to push south into the Sahel, orchestrating a string of coups in West Africa that forced out French and US military missions there and crippling critical Western counterterrorism operations.

Another key component of Russia’s efforts to build up its influence in the Middle East has been to court all sides of every regional conflict, which, as noted above, has included Iranian proxies and non-state allies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Houthis in Yemen. Tehran’s continued ability to support this proxy network is, therefore, critical to Russian diplomats’ ability to inject themselves as potential indispensable mediators around the region. Should Washington want to expand the scope of negotiations to security issues beyond the Iranian nuclear weapons program, there is little hope that Russian mediation would provide Tehran with any added incentive to oblige.

Russia uncontained

Russia’s power in the Middle East was checked somewhat only when the collective West imposed a comprehensive sanctions regime in 2022 and robust Western support for Ukraine left the Russian military bogged down on Europe’s doorstep. Syria in December was perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this trend. Forced to redirect its attention away from the Syrian theater, its limited forces based in the country proved completely ineffective at deterring or halting the rebel forces that quickly toppled the Assad regime. The future of Russia’s continued military presence in Syria — and the much-ballyhooed anti-access, area denial (A2/AD) capabilities that presence ostensibly provided it in the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean — is now bleak. But taking Russia up on its offer to mediate the US-Iranian talks could easily reverse that trend.

Who would benefit from Russia being allowed to broker US-Iranian negotiations? Certainly Iran, which, as detailed above, would have a sympathetic partner in its corner during the talks with the US. But the potential wins for Russia would be even more transformative if the Trump administration does not exercise sufficient caution in how it deals with the Kremlin’s diplomatic overtures.

Moscow’s assistance on the Iran file, particularly if it concludes with a new nuclear deal that President Trump could trumpet, would encourage more US leniency and permissiveness toward Russia in the Ukraine war negotiations. The resulting “double deal” in which sanctions end up being lifted from Russia and Iran would then arguably give the Kremlin freer rein in the Middle East as well as allow Moscow to rearm and regroup for future confrontations against Europe and the United States. At the same time, in return for its diplomatic assistance with Iran, Russia would likely seek unrelated or seemingly less critical concessions from the US in other theaters. This could include anything from ending military-military relations with Armenia, revisiting Putin and Trump’s 2018 agreement on joint cybersecurity operations, to pulling US troops from the Baltic States or Poland. Whatever the ask, US acquiescence would undoubtedly harm Western interests or transatlantic solidarity.

Conclusion

A Russian role in US-Iranian talks all but guarantees that whatever deal might be reached would not properly address any of the non-nuclear threats Iran poses to the region or the broader international order. Moscow benefits from Iranian missile and drone technologies, actively supports Iran’s network of non-state proxies, and cooperates with Tehran on sanctions evasion, disinformation, and efforts to undermine US power and influence around the world. It would be loath to see these negotiated away. There is also the risk that for its assistance on Iran, Moscow will demand concessions from Washington on separate issues, agreement to which would undermine American national interests or those of its allies.

The Trump administration should, thus, keep Russia away from its negotiations with Iran. Putin has worked for two and a half decades at building Russia up by cutting America down. The Iranian regime loves this script. America should not let its adversaries write the US out of the playbook. That is exactly what a bad deal will do if Russia has anything to say about it.

 

Dr. Iulia-Sabina Joja is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute. She teaches European security as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and George Washington University. Her research focuses primarily on European and Black Sea security.

Photo by Yevgeny Biyatov/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images