Opinion |
Why Iran and Hezbollah Are Quietly Applauding Putin's War on Ukraine
Iran and Hezbollah are officially neutral on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, not expressing official support for Moscow or for Kyiv. But a deeper dive reveals a very different picture of what they call the 'Russia vs America' war
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A Hezbollah fighter holding his group's flag swears an oath of allegiance to the late Qassem Soleimani, head of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force, at a ceremony in Beirut, LebanonCredit: AP Photo/Hussein Malla
Jason M. Brodsky
David Daoud
Mar. 10, 2022 2:48 PM
As Russia’s war against Ukraine continues, Iran and Hezbollah remain officially neutral. Patron and proxy have neither backed Kyiv’s struggle against Russian aggression – despite their own pretenses to anti-imperial resistance – nor their partner Moscow, which guaranteed their victory over the Assad regime’s opponents in Syria. At different moments, Tehran and Hezbollah’s leadership have even expressed sympathy with both belligerents.
But their neutrality is superficial. A careful analysis of their leadership’s pronouncements, alongside their media outlets, reveals that both are stealthily pro-Russian, hoping its war in Ukraine will erode American global influence, while being officially agnostic
Iran has reacted carefully to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently
addressed the subject, stressing Tehran’s "oppos[ition] to war and destruction," but without once mentioning Russia.
Instead, he focused on criticizing the United States, calling it a "mafia regime" that creates centers of crisis, like in Ukraine. Khamenei said Washington "dragged Ukraine to this point" – for example through NATO expansion, and blamed the instability on American interference in Ukrainian internal affairs, organizing anti-government rallies, launching velvet revolutions, and visits by U.S. senators.
Iran replicated this veiled approach, blaming the United States coupled with silence on Russia, with its careful abstention on the U.N. General Assembly’s resolution condemning Russian aggression.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, at far right, meeting in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin, far left, in Moscow in January.Credit: Sputnik/Reuters
Iran’s approach, including Khamenei’s, of fixating on the United States to explain the events in Ukraine, can be explained by the Islamic Republic’s standing paranoia of U.S. sponsorship of regime change, especially stemming from Tehran’s own 2009 Green Movement. Meanwhile, Russia has helped shield Iran from accountability for its own regional destabilization, while Tehran’s leadership favors pragmatically turning East to undermine U.S. global hegemony.
Insofar as the Russian invasion of Ukraine can curtail this American influence, Iran is supportive. These considerations have factored into the Iranian reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Nevertheless, Iran also carries a historical suspicion of Russia, dating back to the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828, which
ceded land to Russia. This also
manifested itself during the 2015 nuclear talks, when Iran’s then foreign minister accused the Kremlin of sabotage, and again with the recent negotiations to revive the nuclear deal with Tehran.
When Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov demanded broad economic guarantees from Washington amid a burgeoning sanctions regime on Moscow over Ukraine, an Iranian media outlet even accused the Kremlin of holding
Tehran hostage.
Thus, Tehran is treading carefully, explaining the events in Ukraine through its anti-American ideological lens, but without being decidedly pro-Russian.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov welcomes the head of Hezbollah's bloc in the Lebanese parliament, Mohamad Raad, for talks in Moscow, Russia Credit: Russian Foreign Ministry Press Service via AP
In fact, some of the group’s
officials castigated the Lebanese Foreign Ministry’s pro-Ukrainian
statement on the war – not necessarily for siding with Kyiv, but for taking a side at all, a
sentiment echoed by the ostensibly "
leftist" pro-Hezbollah
Al-Akhbar newspaper. It said this risked harming
vital relations with Russia in an attempt by Beirut to
ingratiate itself with the
United States and
the West.
What commentary Hezbollah’s leaders have offered has been fleeting and circumspect, confined to condemnations of the United States for – as they put it – starting the war.
In this vein, from Secretary-General Hassan
Nasrallah down to the group’s
parliamentarians, the party has confined itself to applying the mainstays of Hezbollah’s anti-American propaganda to the particulars of the Ukraine-Russia war: That, true to form, the United States instigated the conflict by inciting the Ukrainians, prevented Moscow and Kyiv from reaching any peaceful solutions, and now that war has broken out, has
abandoned its
Ukrainian allies to
their fate.
Even the two notable exceptions to this studied neutrality, by Hezbollah Central Council Member
Nabil Qaouq and former Minister
Mohammad Fneich, were more descriptive than prescriptive.
They noted that the United States had
stoked the war through Ukrainian "
tools" to halt the trend towards a multipolar world order, and away from Washington’s "exploitative" global primacy, but that the international balance of power was nevertheless now set to tilt against the United States and, by extension, its Middle Eastern allies.
