Putin does not condemn the Iranian attack on Israel. But will a Middle East war benefit him – or is the opposite the case? Russia is a close ally of Iran.
A conflagration would threaten the positions of power into which Russia has maneuvered itself in the Middle East in recent years. China could act as a mediator to fill the gap left by an escalating situation in the Mideast, says Michelle Grisé of the RAND Research Institute. The China-brokered normalization of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia gave a foretaste of a possible new order in the region, GrisÉ says. Neither Putin nor Biden are neutralators anymore, so China threatens to overtake them in this regard, she adds, so Russia is no longer a suitable mediator for the region's affairs.. If Iran would need most of these missiles itself, there would be little left for Russia, says Grisés. But this does not mean that Vladimir Putin is interested in a full-scale war that may do more harm than good.