Tuesday 03 Mar 2026 @ 16:25
Chatham House
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The Iran war exposes the limits of Russia’s leverage in a fragmenting regional order

EXPERT COMMENT

The war will not affect Russian plans in Ukraine – but it will likely force a rethink of long-held Russian strategic concepts.

In a diplomatic note to the Iranian government dated 29 March 1944, Vyacheslav Molotov, then foreign minister of the Soviet Union, noted that ‘the Soviet Union [couldn’t] remain indifferent to the fate of Iran’. That statement crystallized a perennial tenet of Soviet foreign policy – one that still synthesizes much of Moscow’s approach to the Middle East today: Iran is not a dispensable peripheral actor. It is a structural node on the southern flank of the Russian Central Asian zone of influence.

The current military confrontation between Iran on the one side, and the United States (US) and Israel on the other, might well push this logic to its limits. Moscow may be forced to navigate a new and possibly perilous geometry of utility, ideology, and strategic restraint. 

Depending on the war’s outcome, the Kremlin might see its already wobbly strategic architecture in the Middle East so badly undermined that it is compelled to reassess its regional calculus.

Click here to continue reading the full version of this Expert Comment on the Chatham House website.

 

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Original article link: https://www.chathamhouse.org/2026/03/iran-war-exposes-limits-russias-leverage-fragmenting-regional-order

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