The US bombing Iran was a win for ... Putin

By Marc Champion

The consensus after Israel’s 12-day war with Iran seems to be that it ended in humiliation — not just for the Islamic Republic, but also Russia, which failed to lift a finger for a loyal ally and lost a supplier of critical drones. But that profoundly misreads both President Vladimir Putin’s priorities and the timescale on which he conducts foreign policy.

There’s no doubt that Putin’s ambition to reassert Russia as a force in the Middle East has been set back. The fall of President Bashar Al-Assad in Syria was a significant loss. His failure to come to the aid of Iran, with whom he’d just signed a 20-year strategic partnership was embarrassing.

A year ago, that would indeed have hurt Moscow’s war effort in Ukraine, but Russia now makes its own version of the Iranian Shahed drones. Much more important is to understand where all this fits into Putin’s worldview and priorities. Destroying the Ukrainian state ranks much higher for the Russian president than any other foreign policy goal, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere. And on that score, the US-Israeli attack on Iran was a net positive.

In a broad sense, the outbreak of another war in the Middle East has sucked attention, energy and resources away from Ukraine, leaving Putin with a free hand. Even at last week’s NATO summit, the core deliverable of a pledge to boost defense spending — to levels only justifiable by the threat from Russia — was shunted to the corner. Nobody wanted to anger Donald Trump during his victory lap.

More concretely, Israel was able to blunt the impact of the Islamic Republic’s missile barrages only by consuming a significant part of its air-defense stockpiles, as well as some from the US, which lent a hand using shipborne air defense systems. Equally, the US could only involve itself once it was confident it had enough Patriot batteries in place to protect its military bases around the region.

That threat may have receded for now, but planners at the Pentagon are obliged to assume the war restarts and more air defense will be needed, making less available for Ukraine. They went further, confirming on Tuesday night they were halting already planned military aid for Ukraine, including air defense supplies. A Pentagon statement said the decision put American interests first, and that “the strength of the United States Armed Forces remains unquestioned — just ask Iran.”

The Trump slogan used was false. The Department of Defense has put Russian interests first; the US cannot benefit from a rout of Ukrainian forces and the wider destabilization of Europe that would bring.

The recent dramatic boost in Russian missile and drone strikes on Ukraine was well timed. Overnight on Monday, Russia launched its biggest single barrage since the start of the war, including 477 drones and decoys, as well as 60 ballistic missiles that require high-level interceptors, such as Patriots. The fact that Ukraine lost an F-16 and its pilot trying to shoot down some of the barrage is a clear indication of the strain on the country’s air defense systems.

The attacks in previous days had been only a little smaller, so there was an air of desperation around President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s ask for more Patriot interceptors when he met with his US counterpart at NATO. There was also truth to Trump’s comments afterward. He said he’d told Zelenskiy that he’d see what the US could do, but that the Patriots were hard to get, because: “We need them too. We were supplying them to Israel.” Meanwhile, the Pentagon was cutting off even planned supplies.

This is what matters to Putin, far more than the optics abroad of his failure to come to Iran’s aid. For this war will define a legacy that he sees in the context of the Russian Empire’s construction over centuries. Or as his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, reportedly quipped in 2022, his boss has just three advisers: “Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.”

Nothing that has happened in the last three years has dented this vision of Great Russian restoration. To Putin, not only is the very existence of Ukraine an affront, but the reabsorption of its resources — human, economic and military — into mother Russia is the sine qua non for Moscow’s ability to remain at the top of the multipolar world order he sees replacing Western dominance. This is the reason for which Ukraine’s plan to sign a trade treaty with the European Union so enraged him in 2013; it meant Kyiv would not join his own rival group, the Eurasian Union.

“All of Ukraine is ours,” Putin told an enthusiastic domestic audience at the annual St. Petersburg Economic Forum, on June 20. He wasn’t shy about adding a new city, Sumy, as a new public target for occupation, either. Make no mistake, Odesa and Kharkiv would be next on the list, whose extent and end will be determined solely by what the Kremlin deems possible at acceptable cost.

Ukraine is at a critical juncture. Until Trump came to office, it was evenly balanced as to whether Putin would be able to continue to exchange swathes of his armed forces for small increments of Ukrainian land long enough for Kyiv’s defenses to collapse. With Trump’s withdrawal of US military support, those calculations have shifted and the long-range missile and drone war forms an essential part of Russia’s path to victory.

From the moment Ukraine runs out of air defense interceptors, Russia’s air force — still menacing in its scale and capabilities — would for the first time be able to impose air superiority across the country. The impunity that Israeli jets enjoyed over Iran should serve as a timely reminder of exactly what this could mean for Ukraine: A catastrophic collapse of defensive lines as its troops were bombed into submission from the air.

Trump recently switched from the moral obscenity of blaming Ukraine for being invaded, to complaining about Putin’s disinterest in peace talks. But he needs to do a lot better than that. He needs to recognize, at least to himself, that Putin has played him. The intelligence operative running the Kremlin has leveraged Trump's desperation for a ceasefire to further Russia’s war aims, and at a time when he too has growing vulnerabilities, including a looming credit crisis.

It may be years before anyone can say with certainty that the US military intervention in Iran was a success or failure. But if there is one conclusion Trump can draw from its success in imposing a ceasefire on Israel and Iran, it’s that for peace-through-strength to work, you need to first show the strength. That’s something he has woefully failed to do in his dealings with the Kremlin.