Will Russia Send Its Troops To Iran To Expand Their Military Axis?

After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Russia is strengthening its military axis with the radical regime in Iran, aimed at countering American power, a constellation of leading scholars in the United States and the UK agreed that this autocratic duad presents an exploding threat to all the Western democracies.

But most of these scholars, sprinkled across elite universities and think tanks in Britain and the U.S., told me in a series of interviews that Zelensky’s prediction the Kremlin could send its soldiers to join the Iran War, to face off against Israeli and American forces, is unlikely to materialize.

Zelensky said in a series of posts on the messaging platform X that Russia’s joining forces with Iran to co-develop bomber drones, and its providing the Islamic Republic with sophisticated intelligence to precisely target American defense outposts and soldiers across the Mideast, shows that: “Each of these regimes has set itself against the world.”

“We see that the Russians are now trying to manipulate the situation in the Middle East and the Gulf region in favor of their aggression,” Zelensky added, “and also to effectively turn the Iranian regime’s strikes against its neighbors and American bases into a second front of Russia’s war against Ukraine and, more broadly, against the entire West.”

After aiding Tehran’s design of missiles and air defenses, he forecast, Moscow could expand this entente by dispatching Kremlin combatants to defend its embattled confederate.

Just days before American and Israeli bomber jets and missile brigades began bombarding Iran in February, Moscow sent warships to lead joint military exercises with the navy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to a report by the London-based broadcaster Iran International.

But the Russian ships never engaged with the American aircraft carriers sent into the region.

Victoria Samson, chief director of space security at the globally influential defense think tank Secure World Foundation, in Washington, D.C., says she agrees with President Zelensky’s assessment that the Iran War is in some ways becoming a new front in the wider Russian-Iranian war with the West, a conflict that started with Russia’s blitzkrieg on Ukraine, and its provocative flights by drones and jet fighters into the airspace of NATO nations.

In the new battlegrounds across the Middle East, she says, “I very much hope that the Russians don’t send ground troops, as it’s looking increasingly like the U.S. is upping our presence there.”

“I don’t like the potential outcome if U.S. and Russian soldiers are in active combat with each other,” she told me in an interview, “as opposed to fighting by proxy like we did throughout the Cold War.”

One of the foremost experts in the U.S. on space defense and space wars, Samson says she questions the accuracy of press reports that Israel Defense Forces destroyed Tehran’s secret project to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile, with the help of Russian weapons designers.

The Jerusalem Post reported that an IDF strike on Iran’s aerospace headquarters this month destroyed Tehran’s drive to develop a nuclear-capable missile “that could be fired into space and hit the U.S.”

“Until Sunday’s attack on the site,” The Jerusalem Post recounted, “Israeli officials were concerned that … the latest space cooperation between Moscow and Tehran would increase Iran’s capabilities to launch ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles), as well as improve its monitoring of targets in the Jewish state and throughout the region in the short term.”

Iran started its missile program based on access to Soviet Russian missiles, Samson says.

While Moscow has aided the Islamic Republic in making its kamikaze drones faster and more lethal, she adds, it is unlikely that the Kremlin is supporting any Iranian project to perfect a transatlantic missile.

“Russia is not incentivized (nor I would guess have the resources) to pour that level of money into someone else’s ICBM program,” she says.

Spenser Warren, one of the foremost American experts on the evolution of Russia’s defense structure and strategies, including its nuclear weapons modernization drive, under Supreme Commander-in-Chief Vladimir Putin, says he would not second President Zelensky’s prediction that the Kremlin could dispatch its armed forces to help defend Iran.

“I cannot see a scenario where Russia would deploy troops to Iran and directly engage with the United States and Israel,” he told me in an interview.

Warren, a Stanton nuclear security postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, says he can’t envision “Russia assessing that such a move is in their strategic interest.”

“This would be much too high of a risk—such a deployment could lead to escalation, even if inadvertently,” he says, and “it could also result in U.S. or European troops on the ground in Ukraine—with too little to gain.”

“Russia just does not have that ability at the moment, even if they wanted to.”

“Russian forces are still bogged down in Ukraine, where there have been minimal advances—if any—for months,” he adds.

“They simply wouldn’t have the manpower and materiel to open a second front, especially a second front that would directly bring multiple major militaries into its war against Ukraine.”

Yet he adds that “Russian attempts to provide Iran with other forms of aid, including intelligence aid,” reinforces Zelensky’s broader point about the accelerating military competition between the Kremlin and the White House.

“The U.S. and others have provided similar aid to Ukraine, so on one level this could be seen as a tit-for-tat retaliation by Moscow.”

Helping Iran target American defense outposts across the Mideast “is one way Russia can attempt to weaken the United States—both in terms of manpower and in terms of domestic support for military adventurism—without seriously risking escalation and without using up valuable human and financial resources.”

The recent U.S. decision to freeze its sanctions on the Kremlin’s worldwide sales of oil, viewed in light of Moscow’s expanding defense entanglement with Tehran, is illogical, he says.

“This could be a windfall for the Russian economy and boost the Russian war effort right when Moscow was starting to feel significant pressure and the [Ukraine] war was clearly turning into at best a stalemate as Russian advances continued to stall.”

“Frankly,” he adds, “lifting the sanctions threatens to be among the worst of many strategic blunders that the Trump Administration has made as part of this war.”

Elena Grossfeld, a prominent expert on Russia’s shadow war on the West, and on its intelligence operations worldwide, at King’s College London, says President Zelensky’s warning the Kremlin could speed its soldiers to the Middle East conflict could be off the mark.

“Russia is in no position to open a real second front [in Iran], with their hands full in the first,” in Ukraine, she told me in an interview.

Yet the new Persian Gulf battlefront “is probably another convenient location for intelligence assistance and possibly a hybrid warfare front,” adds Grossfeld, a scholar at the prestigious King’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence.

Russia’s providing Iran with sophisticated satellite intel likely aided Tehran’s aerial assaults on American missile defense systems across the Middle East, including radar installations and leading-edge THAAD interceptors, she says, as part of the space war that is being waged inside the wider Iran War.

“There has been a historical cooperation with Russia on Iran’s missile development,” she points out, but no evidence so far that Russian arms experts were contributing to an Iranian drive to develop an ICBM or an anti-satellite missile.

Yet Grossfeld says the stepped-up defense ties between the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran are being closely charted by the U.S. government, and points to a recent State Department report that states Russia is bolstering its “longstanding diplomatic, economic, and military sector support to Iran.”

Since the start of Russia’s aerial blitzes on Ukraine, top American diplomats reported, Iran has sent Moscow killer drones, “guided aerial bombs, artillery ammunition, and close-range ballistic missiles.”

“Russia, in turn, began to offer Iran an unprecedented level of defense cooperation,” they added, “including on missiles, electronics, and air defense.”

The Kremlin has also teamed up with Iran’s revolutionary leaders to design an array of weapons platforms to attack the SpaceX Starlink system, Grossfeld says.

Possessors of contraband Starlink terminals smuggled into Iran face capital punishment for using the stations, which enable daredevil dissidents to connect with the World Wide Web despite the internet blackout that has been imposed across the country.

Russia has helped Iran develop drones to locate SpaceX terminals that have been camouflaged across rooftops Iran-wide, along with electronic warfare gear to jam transmissions between SpaceX’s constellation and the terrestrial transceivers.

Any defense-tech breakthroughs in Iran’s battle against the banned terminals, Grossfeld predicts, will in turn be deployed by Kremlin commandos in their parallel war against the Starlink system in Ukraine.