US President Donald Trump thinks the scale of Russia’s military aid to Iran is “a little bit.”
He told Fox News on March 13 that Moscow “may be helping them a little bit.”
The next day, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragushi succinctly stated that military cooperation between Russia and Tehran was “good.”
His words appear to confirm previous media reports that Russia is providing Iran with satellite and intelligence data on the locations of U.S. warships and aircraft.
That may not sound like a big deal, given the West’s military satellite advantage and Russia’s battlefield losses and communications problems after Elon Musk’s SpaceX turned off a smuggled Starlink satellite internet terminal.
But Russian space program and military experts say the data Iran is receiving about U.S. military assets most likely comes from Moscow’s only fully operational reconnaissance satellite system, the Liana.
“The (Liana) system was created to spy on and target U.S. carrier strike groups and other naval forces,” Pavel Luzin, a senior researcher at the Jamestown Foundation, a U.S. think tank, told Al Jazeera.
eyes in the sky
Russia also played a key role in the development of Iran’s space program and its main satellite, Khayyam.
Launched from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in 2022, the satellite weighs 650 kg (1,430 lb), orbits Earth at 500 km (310 miles), and has a resolution of 1 meter (3.3 feet).
Luzhin said the Russian government “theoretically could receive and process data from Iran’s optical imaging satellites and share data from multiple satellites of its own.”
On Wednesday, Tehran claimed to have attacked the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln with multiple cruise and ballistic missiles, but the Pentagon called the claim “pure fiction.”
Iranian media claimed on Sunday that an attack on a U.S. destroyer refueling in the Indian Ocean caused a “massive fire.”
Washington did not comment on the attack.
For decades, Russia has supplied Iran with billions of dollars worth of weapons, including advanced air defense systems, trainers, fighter jets, helicopters, armored vehicles and sniper rifles.
Since Washington and Tel Aviv launched airstrikes on February 28, Russia has continued to support Iran with “information, data, experts and weapons parts,” former deputy chief of the Ukrainian military general staff Lt. Gen. Ihor Romanenko told Al Jazeera.
Although Moscow and Tehran have loudly declared a strategic partnership, there is no mutual defense clause and Russia has not intervened directly in the conflict.
However, arms supplies have been mutual. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Tehran has provided Moscow with ammunition and shells, firearms and short-range ballistic missiles, helmets and body armor.
Drone equipped with “Comet”
And then there are the Shahed kamikaze drones, which are slow, noisy, but cheap to manufacture, and were launched into Ukrainian cities in swarms of dozens and even hundreds. Ukraine has become so adept at defeating them that it is now mass-producing inexpensive interceptor systems that specifically target Shahed, offering its own know-how to Gulf states whose U.S. military assets have come under attack from Iran in recent weeks.
In the course of the war with Ukraine, Moscow manufactured and modernized the Shahed, making it faster and more powerful, equipping it with cameras, navigators, and in some cases artificial intelligence modules.
And now some of the upgrades have returned to Iran.
A Shahed drone carrying critical Russian components launched from southern Lebanon by Iran-backed Hezbollah was able to attack a British air force base in Cyprus on March 1, Britain’s Times newspaper reported on March 7.
It reportedly included Cometa-B, a Russian-made satellite navigation module that also acts as an anti-jamming shield, making the drone more resistant to interference.
Russia has also perfected the tactic of sending waves of real and decoy drones to exhaust and overwhelm Western-supplied air defense systems in Ukraine.
Western officials say the program has recently helped Iran achieve its Gulf goals.
“No one will be surprised to believe that President Putin’s hidden hand is behind some of Iran’s tactics and potentially some of its capabilities,” British Defense Secretary John Healey said on March 12, after Iranian drones attacked a base used by Western forces in Erbil, northern Iraq.
But if Iran is running out of drones, as some analysts believe, Russian tactics and the use of Russian-provided satellite data will be useless, experts say.
“Russia does provide data, that’s clear. That data helps Iran, but it doesn’t help much,” Nikita Smagin, a Russia expert who has written extensively on Moscow-Tehran relations, told Al Jazeera.
Nikolai Mitrokhin, a researcher at the University of Bremen in Germany, said Iran has only launched up to 50 drones a day since a four-day barrage of attacks in early March with up to 250 drones a day.
“Iran ran out of power really quickly,” he told Al Jazeera.
“A gesture of goodwill”
Moreover, the Russian government is not necessarily particularly interested in a military victory for Iran, as this war benefits Russian President Vladimir Putin’s own conflict in Ukraine.
Lieutenant General Romanenko said that the rise in oil prices has “financially enabled President Putin to carry out further hostilities.”
The price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, has soared to more than $100 a barrel in the past three weeks as Iran puts pressure on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. US President Donald Trump was forced to suspend sanctions on Russian oil in a bid to ease the economic backlash. As a result, as countries compete for Russian oil cargoes at sea, tankers carrying Russian crude oil bound for China are making U-turns in the open ocean and redirecting to India. Ural crude oil prices rebounded.
Romanenko said Putin “has not achieved his goals in Ukraine and will use anything to achieve his vision, including war (in Iran) and lies, and will give an ultimatum.”
Ruslan Suleymanov, an associate researcher at the Center for a New Eurasian Strategy, a U.S.-British think tank, told Al Jazeera that the Kremlin “is not pursuing a breakthrough in this war and is not helping Iran defeat the United States and Israel.”
Current intelligence and military aid is “rather a gesture of goodwill, an attempt to create the illusion of assistance to show Tehran that Russia will not leave its friends in trouble, despite the lack of formal commitments,” he said.
And Tehran, knowing full well how inadequate Moscow’s aid is, has resorted to its own strategy of expanding hostilities across the region through attacks on neighboring countries and paralyzing the global economy with soaring oil prices.
“The Iranians understand that forces are not equal, that it is impossible to defeat the United States and Israel on the battlefield, and that no help from Russia will help.”
President Trump’s assessment that Russia “may be helping them a little” doesn’t seem to be far off the mark.
