Tuesday’s visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin to Tehran for a meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei marks the first time since the invasion of Ukraine that Putin has travelled outside of the former Soviet Union.
Putin claims that Russia is shifting away from the West and toward China, India, and Iran in response to the West’s attempt to damage its economy with the most punitive sanctions in recent memory.
Russia’s top official arrives in Tehran just three days after U.S. Vice President Joe Biden returned from his trip to Saudi Arabia to hold his fifth meeting with Khamenei, Iran’s second supreme leader who took office in 1989.
According to Putin’s foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov, ‘the contact with Khamenei is highly vital.’ The most crucial topics on the bilateral and global agenda have been the subject of a trustworthy discourse that has grown between them.
‘Our positions are similar or same on the majority of subjects.’
Putin will be in Iran at the same time that Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is there. The two leaders will meet in Tehran to talk about a deal to resume grain exports from Ukraine to the Black Sea as well as Erdogan’s threat to launch another operation in northern Syria, which Moscow opposes.
Since the Syrian civil war began in 2011, Russia and Iran have prevailed in Syria by supporting President Bashar al-Assad against calls from the West for his overthrow.
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