On the heels of President Biden's trip to the Middle East, which was aimed in part at galvanizing a regional alliance against Iran, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday visited Tehran in a move that promises to bolster cooperation between two targets of the U.S. empire.
“It’s the definition of pushback,” Ali Vaez, the Iran project director and senior adviser to the president of the International Crisis Group tells The Wall Street Journal. “They now share a vision of a coalition of sanctioned states, comprised of countries like Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela.”
In a rare foreign excursion during Russia's war in Ukraine, Putin met with Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Ebrahim Raisi, along with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan.
“Our relations are developing at a good pace,” said Putin as he began his meeting with Raisi. “We are strengthening our cooperation on international security issues, making a significant contribution to the settlement of the Syrian conflict.”
Before Putin's arrival, Russian gas producer Gazprom and Iran's national oil company signed a $40 billion deal in which Gazprom will help develop oil and gas fields, and complete liquefied natural gas facilities and gas export pipelines.
That deal is a welcome shot in arm for Iran, whose economy continues to be suffocated by Western sanctions. The Ukraine war has had its own negative impact, per Reuters:
In May, [we] reported that Iran's crude exports to China had fallen sharply as Beijing favored heavily discounted Russian barrels, leaving almost 40 million barrels of Iranian oil stored on tankers at sea in Asia and seeking buyers.
There are more dimensions to the growing economic cooperation between Russia and Iran. For example, in June, we reported on a pilot run of a new trade route connecting Russia to India via Iran, called the "International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC)."
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