Putin pledges support to Iran, rallies leaders to challenge U.S.
The Russian leader Putin made his pledge of ongoing support just days after Treasury Scott Bessent announced a new economic pressure campaign against Iran.
In a joint appearance at a regional security meeting, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Tuesday thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for his support in wartime and urged that their nations work together to oppose U.S. sanctions.
The United States and its allies, especially in Europe, have imposed extensive economic penalties on Iran over its nuclear program and more recently its refusal to bow to President Donald Trump’s demands in the Strait of Hormuz; and against Russia for its continuing war in Ukraine.
“They do not have the right to impose sanctions whenever they please, violate international law, and then commit acts of aggression,” Pezeshkian told Putin, according to a Kremlin readout of their meeting on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
Putin, in turn, said that his country was trying to help Tehran in its war with the United States.
“During this difficult period, we are striving to provide you with the necessary assistance — as we have discussed — and are supplying you with essential goods,” Putin said, according to the Kremlin account.
Putin made his pledge of ongoing support just days after Treasury Scott Bessent announced a new economic pressure campaign against Iran called Operation Economic Outcast that he said would result in “unprecedented economic isolation” of Iran.
The meeting in Bishkek highlighted the increasingly close military and political alliance between Moscow and Tehran.
Iran transferred crucial drone technology to Russia that enabled Moscow to establish a domestic production line for the weapons, which have since wreaked havoc across the battlefield in Ukraine.
Russia, in turn, has provided Iran with targeting assistance for retaliatory strikes on U.S. forces and other targets in the Middle East.
Pezeshkian praised the cooperation with Russia and said that together the two nations were standing up to Washington.
“We believe — and are confident — that in this way we can counter U.S. unilateralism and the unjust sanctions imposed upon us,” he said, according to the Kremlin readout. “We can find ways to circumvent them; within frameworks like the SCO and other organizations, we can bypass unilateral measures and cooperate on a multilateral basis.”
Putin, in his remarks, lamented the collapse of a 60-day ceasefire between the United States and Iran, which failed to yield a durable truce or agreement on reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway vital to global oil shipments.
“We welcomed the conclusion of the Iranian-American ceasefire memorandum this June, but, unfortunately, the truce proved unstable and all too fragile,” Putin said.
The meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization brought together 10 leaders — including Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and India’s Narendra Modi — for a two-day conference.
Putin’s meeting with Pezeshkian also followed a visit to Moscow by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, which prompted speculation that Washington was seeking to warn Putin against escalating the war in Ukraine or expanding Russian assistance to Iran.
Ratcliffe’s visit to Russia, the first known visit there by a CIA director since late 2021, was preceded by fresh U.S. intelligence indicating that the Kremlin sees the United States as weakened by the Iran war, potentially offering Russia an opportunity to escalate provocations against American interests or its allies in Europe.
The discussions at the Bishkek summit in many ways circled around the two wars, which have been marked by China extending varying degrees of political, economic, and strategic support to Moscow and Tehran, while testing the limits of Washington’s ability to project power globally.
Last year, Trump threatened to impose heavy tariffs on countries buying Russian oil after the 2022 invasion — with China and India among the biggest customers — as a means of inflicting pain that might cripple the Russian budget.
But the 100% tariffs that Trump threatened never materialized, and this year, when U.S. military action against Iran sent global oil prices soaring, the Trump administration temporarily eased sanctions on Russian oil to help counter the price spikes and the resulting energy crisis.
In recent weeks, Trump reached for the same playbook against Iran, threatening an “economic D-Day” on countries that provided Tehran with assistance. Experts, however, say the new pressure is unlikely to wring concessions.
In a joint statement released Tuesday, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization leaders condemned “military strikes on the territory of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which have resulted in numerous civilian casualties and significant damage to the country’s economy.”
Without directly criticizing U.S. sanctions on Iran or broader Western sanctions on Russia over its war on Ukraine, the leaders also said in their declaration that they are opposed to any “unilateral coercive measures” that could have a “negative impact on the global economy.”
For Putin, his blooming bromances with Xi and Pezeshkian and his much-sought-after alignment of non-Western states against Washington were interrupted briefly by Modi’s call for an end to the war in Ukraine for humanity’s sake.
“Every day of war sets humanity back a step; we need to move from endless war to its conclusion,” Modi said Monday, ahead of a meeting with Putin.
Putin responded with a perfunctory smile, saying that Russia “is moving toward exactly that” — a statement contradicted by Moscow’s near-daily missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities.
