Putin’s support for Iran, which Trump stubbornly refuses to acknowledge

The US Congress has finally passed the bill imposing sanctions on Russia and Iran, renamed the Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, after the senator who conceived, championed and, at times, watered down the bill over many months – not so much to secure the support of parliamentarians, which has always been there in a rare show of bipartisan unity, but to win over President Donald Trump, who has yet to sign it into law. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has for years witnessed the procrastination and confusion of his Western allies (the EU gets bogged down over sanctions with every new package, yet it carries on), thanked Congress, emphasising that whilst MPs were finally voting, Russia was striking residential buildings and infrastructure in eight Ukrainian regions with drones and missiles, as it does every day, with increasingly unpunished violence.

If the sanctions are strong, Zelensky said, “efforts towards peace, including the diplomatic efforts of the United States, Europe and our friends, can succeed”. There are no Russian efforts; on the contrary, the Kremlin has been preparing for a long and wide-ranging war – against Europe – for a long time; the only way to end the war is for Vladimir Putin to no longer have the means to wage it.

Looking back, the mistakes made in terms of arms supplies, air cover, and the embargo on resources and components by Ukraine’s allies – who were convinced it was possible to stop the Russian president through negotiation – become clear. Then Trump arrived, and those mistakes appeared even more fatal, because the misguided assumptions and delays hampered Ukraine, which failed to gain the upper hand that would have prevented Putin from sadistically exploiting the American president’s unbridled short-sightedness – and the lives of Ukrainians. Trump not only positioned himself as a neutral mediator – which means depriving the country under attack of its right to defend itself, and, as it is also an ally, denying it the aid necessary for that defence, as indeed happened – but he also slowed down the adoption of sanctions against Russia, taking the already regrettable caution – that ‘we mustn’t provoke Putin’ (so now Russia is barking at NATO’s doorstep; in fact, it’s already in the living room).

Ever since Trump decided to go to war with Iran, his relationship with Russia has undergone a further distortion: he either ignores or dismisses the alliance between Moscow and Tehran as irrelevant. Ever since the start of military operations against Iran, Western intelligence agencies – including the Ukrainian services, which measure the impact of that alliance in terms of deaths, as well as the American ones – have reported evidence of how Russian assistance has made Iran’s ability to strike American targets in the Middle East more precise and lethal. Yesterday, CNN published an exclusive report detailing the latest chapter in this assistance: “Fourteen Russian spy satellites were spotted over a US military base in Saudi Arabia two days before a devastating attack by Iran. The timing and sequence of the satellites’ movements gave them access to a wide range of data which, according to US and international intelligence sources, helped Tehran carry out one of its most precise attacks against US assets.” Russia supplies Iran with equipment, components and intelligence. The two countries have joint plans to produce new weapons and act in unison on their respective fronts; yet while Trump may not care much about attacks on Ukraine, he certainly does care about attacks on his own bases. Yet every time the issue has been put directly to him or to other members of the Administration, the responses have been vague, as if this axis were not the source of an offensive against the whole of the West, including America. There are significant collateral effects, because by dismantling the existing system of alliances, we end up not only with a Trump who is hostile towards Europe – no comment on Russian attacks in EU and NATO countries, but, on the other hand, great jubilation when pro-Russian and anti-European parties such as Germany’s AfD win – but also towards allies in the Gulf, first and foremost Saudi Arabia, which is under attack from the Houthis – allies of Iran – and finds more support in Israel (yes, in Israel) than in America.

When the war against Iran began, Lindsey Graham – a staunch opponent of the Tehran regime – had revived his bill and reiterated with greater emphasis: ‘We are close to a vote’, because he was convinced that by that point it would also become important for Trump to strike a blow against the collaboration between Russia and Iran. He died (suddenly) without seeing his bill passed. Now that the bill is in place – and this is good news, not least given the House voting figures which show that support for Ukraine in Congress is far from having waned – many experts have examined the bill in detail and note, with alarm, that it effectively provides tools to impose tariffs far beyond the initial objectives, which would otherwise be open to challenge due to the Supreme Court ruling. Some analysts suggest that this broader scope, rather than the original aim of countering Russia, may explain why the legislation was ultimately enacted.