Iran-allied Russia warns the U.S. but hangs back from clash
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends midnight Orthodox Christmas Mass in St. Petersburg, Russia, early Tuesday morning. Credit: AP/Alexei Nikolsky
After all the Russia-related controversy that President Donald Trump has created, the spotlight now turns to how Russian President Vladimir Putin and his regime will react to U.S.-Iran tensions.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is due to call on Putin Saturday in Moscow where they are expected to discuss Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine and their bilateral ties.
Russia and Germany have expressed concern about the fate of the 2015 Iran nuclear accord to which they were parties and which the United States is derailing. Their actions, if any, in the wake of Trump's ordered assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani could prove as relevant as the U.S. State Department's.
Not that Putin, whose nation recently conducted joint military exercises with the Islamic Republic, would want to get involved in any escalation.
Oil prices are up amid the crisis. Russia has 11 percent of the world's production. Price rises might be seen as fine with Moscow.
Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The Wall Street Journal: “Iran is one of the most strategically lonely countries in the world. It considers dozens of countries around the world its adversary, and its only reliable friend has been the Assad regime in Syria."
While Iran is considered an ally, Russia “benefits from an isolated, anti-American Iran that can’t exploit its energy resources,” Sadjadpour said.
Remember Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov? He's the official to whom Trump once blabbed guarded intelligence information in the Oval Office about ISIS's use of laptop computers for terrorist threats.
These days Lavrov darkly warns the American administration of dire consequences.
Lavrov spoke by phone with Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif last Friday to discuss Soleimani, who has been held responsible for past attacks on Americans overseas, the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement.
“Lavrov expressed his condolences over the killing,” the statement said. “The ministers stressed that such actions by the United States grossly violate the norms of international law.”
An influential Russian senator, Konstantin Kosachev, told the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti that the Soleimani killing marked, "very difficult news, a harbinger of new clashes between the Americans and radical Shiites in Iraq."
Kosachev said it "looks very much like the revenge of the Americans" for the recent storming of the embassy in Baghdad by an Iran-backed militant group.
"And if that is so, then retaliation, alas, will not take long," said Kosachev, as reported by Newsweek. "But I will be glad to be proved wrong because wars are easy to start, but very difficult to end."
As with Trump’s other moves in the Mideast, particularly the recent Syria pullout, Putin's role in the region seems to grow.
With the accustomed cynicism, Putin and allies have linked the Trump-Iran escalation to his impeachment problems at home.
But at the same time, one anti-Putin activist, British businessman Bill Browder, suggests in a troll-ish way that the Suleimani killing would worry Putin.
"I think that more than anything, Putin is absolutely terrified by the assassination of Soleimani," Browder told the online publication Salon.
"If the US can go after a high-level military enemy from the air with drones and kill him, it means that the US can go after any of their political and military enemies in the same way," Browder said. "At some point it could be Putin’s turn."
Maybe not so much on Trump's watch, however.
For one thing it was reported recently that Putin got Trump's attention enough to convince him of the far-fetched scenario that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in the 2016 U.S. election.
For another, Putin recently called to thank Trump for the United States passing along intelligence that led to the arrest of two Russians for allegedly plotting a terror attack in St. Petersburg. That's the second such courtesy in two years.
Twenty-nine years after the Soviet Union collapsed, Kremlinology remains as complex as ever.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
