Good, bad and ugly: Impact of US Iran strikes on Russia war talks

To a considerable degree, President Donald Trump won the presidency in 2024 because voters embraced his message of keeping America out of protracted conflicts and his promise to end the war in Ukraine.

The administration has made substantial operational headway, particularly in reopening stable channels for dialogue with Russia, but it has proven difficult to arrive at a framework for a negotiated settlement that enjoys buy-in from all the stakeholders — Ukraine, Russia, and Europe.

A sharp diversion of American resources and attention to the Middle-East threatens to make the goal of facilitating a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine more evasive still.

The Israel-Iran war stimulated an effusion of speculation, most of it unfounded, around Russia’s supposed interests in aiding its “ally” Iran. In point of fact, there is no tangible sense in which Russia is militarily allied to Iran. One has merely to read the text of the Russia-Iran Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, signed in January 2025, to discover that the parties’ only concrete security obligation toward one another if either one comes under attack is to “not provide any military or other assistance to the aggressor which would contribute to the continued aggression.”

Moscow's relationship with Tehran, though it is more than simply friendly and does reach quite far in the fields of economic and political cooperation, is part of a larger portfolio of Middle-Eastern interests that includes maintaining constructive relations with Israel and the Arab states. The idea that Russia had the slightest intention of allowing itself to be drawn into a military confrontation with Israel over Iran was based purely on the ideological framing, popular among certain subsets of the transatlantic foreign policy community but with little connection to reality, that Moscow is duty-bound to support Tehran by dint of shared autocratic affiliation.

No less wrongheaded is the notion that U.S. strikes against three Iranian nuclear facilities sent a “message” to Russia about American resolve, as it’s unclear what that message was supposed to be.

When it comes to potential aggression against NATO countries, there is no indication that the Kremlin doubted or wanted to test the deterrent credibility of American commitment to the alliance’s Article 5 collective defense provisions prior to the American bombing runs. On the issue of Ukraine, the U.S. has repeatedly demonstrated even under a previous administration which was vastly more invested in Kyiv’s victory that it will not fight Russia over Ukraine. It is neither credible nor advisable, considering White House officials’ consistent skepticism of the idea that core U.S. interests are on the line in Ukraine and their desire to deescalate tensions with Russia, to maintain any degree of strategic ambiguity on the prospect of entering direct hostilities with Russia.

Moreover,, the Iranian strikes were conducted in the context of American and Israeli escalation dominance, which made it possible for the U.S. to seize the diplomatic initiative and steer the conflict to its termination with a ceasefire between Israel and Iran after twelve days.

No such conditions exist between Russia and Ukraine, where it is Moscow that maintains the battlefield initiative and holds the capacity to intensify or de-escalate the war as it sees fit.

Yet the linkage between Russia and Iran is significant in other ways. One can easily see how Kremlin officials would fall upon the belief that the White House knew about Israel’s decision to attack Iran and used previous rounds of nuclear talks with Tehran to lull Iranian leadership into a false sense of security. This perception, if left unaddressed, can run a red pen through the work the administration has done to build bilateral trust with Russia and present itself as a good faith negotiator.

The best way to dispel this lingering sense of unease is to make an effort to reengage Iran in substantive negotiations. To the extent that Russia shares and is in a position to contribute to the U.S. goal of achieving a peaceful framework for an Iran without nuclear weapons, the administration should consider taking Putin up on his offer to support the Iran talks.

Russia is already deeply engaged in the region, reportedly including through secret negotiations with Israel over Iran and Syria. Leveraging the Moscow-Tehran-Jerusalem triangle as a vector for reviving the Iran nuclear talks not only advances American interests in the Middle-East but, insofar it establishes larger U.S.-Russia linkages, can generate positive diplomatic momentum toward a negotiated settlement over Ukraine.

The Iran-Israel war has also accentuated the hard limits of U.S. ability to sustain, whether directly or indirectly, multiple high-intensity conflicts.

Previously apportioned U.S. aid packages to Ukraine were slated to run their course by the end of summer. The Pentagon’s reported decision to terminate them prematurely evinces the stark tradeoffs, all too often lost on neoconservative observers, that the U.S. faces in funding foreign war efforts across the world while maintaining its own domestic stockpiles and defense posture.

As Elbridge Colby, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, keenly understands, there is not a bottomless reserve of interceptors and other munitions to sustain an attrition war that Ukraine is slowly losing in a theatre that is not vital to core U.S. security interests. Yet resource constraints, though no doubt real and deeply felt by this administration, are only one piece of this puzzle.

Administration officials repeatedly warned that the U.S. would “walk away” unless progress is made toward a negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine. It was always the case that the likeliest, most readily available path to walking away runs not through explosive proclamations of the kind that followed the disastrous February Oval Office confrontation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but rather through a slow, deliberate, and initially subtle diversion of resources and attention away from Ukraine that becomes more pronounced as its cumulative effects compound over time.

The U.S. effort to help Ukraine since 2022, with all its multifarious security, diplomatic, and economic prongs, is the most ambitious aid program ever to be undertaken by a non-belligerent on behalf of a third country to which it has no formal commitments. Observers presciently warned that the all hands on deck strategy taken by the Biden administration was unsustainable given the challenges faced by the U.S. in other parts of the world, but anything less than singleminded focus on Ukraine was always bound to lead to the unraveling of the West’s maximum-pressure program against Russia and, with it, Kyiv’s ability to prosecute the war.

The aid decision is yet the latest reminder, as if any more were needed, that time is not on Ukraine’s side. Ukrainian and European efforts to get the White House to recommit to the Biden-era “as long as it takes” approach to this war will only expedite the administration’s divestment from it.

Still, American engagement in the peace process remains critical for both Ukraine and broader challenges surrounding European security. Kyiv and its European partners need, now more than ever, to repair to a viable set of initial war termination proposals that can secure U.S. buy-in and serve as a point of departure for getting U.S.-brokered peace talks between Russia and Ukraine back on track.