Iran cements ‘strategic relationship’ with Russia

Iran has sought to shore up its alliance with Russia as part of a diplomatic offensive to offset the effects of renewed US sanctions.

Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hailed his country’s “strategic relationship” with Russia ahead of a meeting with President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

He also took a thinly veiled swipe at Donald Trump, saying the US president's “unreliable” actions had made Iran’s close ties with Moscow all the more necessary.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 multilateral Iran nuclear agreement and begin reimposing economic sanctions on the Middle Eastern country. Washington has since made a concerted international effort to stop its western allies importing Iranian oil.

This appears to have pushed Iran further towards the US’s global rivals. Tehran and Moscow already cooperate militarily in Syria, and have been instrumental in sustaining President Bashar al-Assad during the country’s brutal seven-year civil war.

Iran has also made moves to align closer with China, with Velayati expected to visit Beijing in the near future, Reuters reports.

Yet Iran could be thwarted its effort to woo Putin by one of its great Middle Eastern rivals: Israel.

Haaretz reports that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also met Putin in Moscow on Wednesday, and urged the Russian president to demand that Iranian forces leave Syria.

According to The New Yorker, Israel has joined forces with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and suggested to Trump that the US should offer to cancel the sanctions it imposed on Russia four years ago, following Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, in exchange for Russian action to remove Iranian forces from Syria.