Putin Seeks to Play Both Sides—and Trump—in Iran-Israel Clash

Tehran was promised military aid before Israel’s airstrikes, but it got little more than rhetoric from Moscow.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin wants to avoid an escalation of violence that could end badly for Iran and Russia.

At the start of the year, Russian President Vladimir Putin met his Iranian counterpart at the Kremlin to sign a new strategic partnership to seal the budding alliance between the two countries that had spent the last decade trying to undermine the U.S.-led world order.

Putin Seeks to Play Both Sides—and Trump—in Iran-Israel Clash

Now, after more than a week of punishing Israeli and U.S. airstrikes, that partnership is doing Tehran little good.

When Putin met with Iran’s top diplomat, Abbas Araghchi, on Monday, the Kremlin leader gave a stony-faced assessment of the U.S. strikes. He called the strikes unjustified and unprovoked and said Russia wanted to help the Iranian people.

But the Kremlin leader made no mention of military support in his public remarks ahead of the talks. Instead, he suggested they discuss an exit ramp out of the conflict. “This gives us a chance to…think together about how it would be possible to get out of this situation,” said Putin.

Israeli strikes have targeted Iran’s nuclear program, missiles and top military figures, with the U.S. joining over the weekend by using its most powerful bunker busters. Iran, meanwhile, has gotten little more than rhetorical support from its most powerful backers, including Russia and China.

The partnership between Moscow and Tehran has been a thorn in the side of Western interests in Europe and the Middle East. The two cooperated for almost a decade in Syria to keep President Bashar al-Assad in power. And after Moscow fumbled the initial stages of its invasion of Ukraine, Iran boosted Russia’s war effort with ammunition, artillery shells and thousands of drones.

But Moscow is unlikely to return the favor. With Iran facing its most existential challenge in decades and even calls from President Trump for regime change, Russian military aid is unlikely to come through, analysts said. While the strategic partnership reached between the two countries didn’t include a mutual defense pact, it did strengthen intelligence sharing and prohibit the countries from aiding each other’s enemies in conflicts.

“Iran can ask Russia to back it up in retaliation to the U.S., but Moscow will never accept it,” said Nikolay Kozhanov, an expert on Russian-Iranian relations and a professor at Qatar University.

The move underscores the transactional nature of even Putin’s strongest partnerships as the Kremlin is mired in Ukraine and vulnerable to Western sanctions. Putin wants to avoid an escalation of violence that could end badly for Iran and Russia. He also wants to preserve an on-again-off-again relationship with Israel and his ties with Trump, who has held back on sanctioning Russia despite the Kremlin’s resistance to engaging in substantive peace talks with Ukraine.

That is unlikely to satisfy—or surprise—Iran, which has faced disappointment from the Russians before.

The month after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack killed more than 1,200 Israelis, the Iranian government said it completed a deal for Moscow to supply Sukhoi Su-35 jet fighters, Mi-28 attack helicopters, S-400 air-defense systems and Yak-130 training jets.

The only delivery it got were the training jets. Production problems and diplomatic pressure from other Gulf countries prompted Russia to withhold more sensitive and powerful technology, said Nicole Grajewski, a fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of a book on Iran and Russia.

Last year, Israeli strikes took out some of Iran’s best air-defense systems that had been provided by the Russians. In the months that followed, Russia was either unable or unwilling to replace them. On Monday, Araghchi asked Putin for new air-defense systems and help in restoring its nuclear energy network, according to a person briefed on the talks.

Last week, when pressed by reporters about why Russia wasn’t supplying arms to help Iran counter Israel’s attacks, Putin said Iran’s interest in Russian hardware had died down and that Iran hadn’t made any specific new requests.

“There’s nothing really to talk about,” he said.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Russia’s Vladimir Putin earlier this year, at the Kremlin for the signing of a strategic partnership agreement.

Iran is the most recent Russian partner to experience a cold shoulder from Moscow in a time of need. Armenia, which does have a mutual defense treaty with Russia, received no help from Moscow as its forces in the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan were decimated by Baku’s troops in 2020 and 2023. The debacle accelerated Armenia’s fundamental shift away from alliance with Moscow toward partnership with the U.S.

Similarly, when Syria’s Assad was toppled last year, Putin merely offered asylum to the former strongman and his family.

“Russia is not as good a friend of dictators as it pretends: Putin often turns his back on his autocratic friends when they need him,” said Fabrice Pothier, a former top adviser to North Atlantic Treaty Organization leadership.

Rather than assisting Iran, Putin has instead sought to position himself as a potential mediator in the conflict. Trump dismissed that possibility last week, saying Putin should focus first on mediating the war in Ukraine.

The Israeli-Iranian war could in some ways be beneficial for Moscow, helping to boost the price of oil and shifting attention away from its invasion of Ukraine as Russia is expected to embark on a summer offensive.

Iran could, in fact, emerge from the conflict more isolated and dependent on Russia and China, who could use that to their advantage.

“A common complaint in Iran is that China and Russia, rather than being true friends, exploit Iran’s isolation to get cheap natural resources while selling Iran second-rate military hardware at inflated prices, sometimes never even delivering the promised equipment,” said Tino Sanandaji, a Swedish-Iranian researcher with the Stockholm School of Economics.

Others warned that Russia’s credibility as an ally could be at stake.

“The fact remains Russia couldn’t prevent Israel’s mass strike on a country with which five months ago Russia had signed a strategic partnership agreement,” political scientist Andrey Kortunov wrote. “Moscow is clearly not prepared to go beyond political statements.”

Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com and Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com

Putin Seeks to Play Both Sides—and Trump—in Iran-Israel Clash