Ukraine has fundamentally shifted and intensified the Russo-Iranian relationship.

WAR-REPORT : Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine has fundamentally shifted and intensified the Russo-Iranian relationship. Tehran has leveraged Moscow’s growing material and financial requirements to sustain its war effort to support Tehran’s own domestic and foreign policy objectives. The core of the Russo-Iranian relationship is a mutually binding interest in challenging and eventually overturning the US-led world order.

This shared ideological core allowed the Russo-Iranian relationship to weather and survive tensions and challenges that have arisen since 2022, and the US should not expect this ideological core to weaken in the years ahead. Russo-Iranian cooperation is occurring along seven major axes that relate to and overlap in the defense, economic, and political spheres.

It is also not a perfectly one-to-one relationship—Moscow and Tehran are seeking different outcomes from their collaboration. The interrelated nature of these nodes of cooperation should emphasize to the United States and its allies that the success of Russia cannot be separated from the success of Iran.

Arms transfers between Iran and Russia significantly expanded in frequency and scope following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. ISW-CTP observed a significant increase in the number of bilateral meetings between senior Russian and Iranian defense officials following Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion, as both Tehran and Moscow appeared to be negotiating the terms of their cooperation during the war. Several arms deals likely resulted from these meetings.

Iran provided Russia with roughly 46 drones for Russia to use in Ukraine in August 2022—the first such Iranian weapons transfer since the beginning of the war. Iran has since supplied Russia with additional drones, drone operator training, and other weapons such as short and close-range ballistic missiles, military hardware, and glide bombs. Russia in turn has provided Iran with an unspecified number of Yak-130 combat trainer aircraft and material support for Iran’s network of partners and proxies in exchange for Iranian weapons transfers since 2022. Russia has also supplied Iran with captured Western hardware, likely for Iranian study and eventual reverse-engineering.