A budding courtship between Russia and Iran is an unwelcome development for the West that the United States will watch with concern, but it falls well short of a geopolitical game changer.
Russian President Vladimir Putin used a rare foreign trip on Tuesday — his first outside the former Soviet Union since he launched the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 — to hold talks in Tehran with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Ebrahim Raisi, as well as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
But the fact that Russia and Iran are competing energy producers is likely to place limits on any deeper partnership, even though the two countries are united in their hostility toward the West.