In January, a few days after U.S. commandos raided the fortified compound of the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro, and flew him in handcuffs to New York, Donald Trump told the Times, “I don’t need international law.” The only limit on his global powers, he said, was “my own morality. My own mind.” Not long after, Trump claimed that Greenland’s strategic location and reserves of critical minerals made it too valuable to remain outside of direct U.S. control. (“You defend ownership. You don’t defend leases,” he said.) Last month, Trump oversaw the launch of the Board of Peace, a body of more than two dozen member countries with the stated mission of reconstructing Gaza, which Trump has advertised as a possible replacement for the United Nations. Now, most dramatically, the U.S. and Israel have started a war against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the very first day.

For many years, the conventional wisdom on Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, was that he hungered for a world in which power and interests, not norms or international law, drove state behavior. Ideas like empire and spheres of influence were not anachronisms or pejoratives but descriptors of how geopolitics functions in practice. Large countries with strong militaries could impart their will on smaller ones; institutions were to be bypassed and weakened, freeing superpowers to act.

In the wake of Khamenei’s killing, Putin offered pro-forma objections to “armed Israeli-American aggression,” calling the “assassination” of Iran’s Supreme Leader a “cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law.” But, on a more fundamental level, Putin was facing an unsettling new reality: his vision of the world was coming to pass, except he had been deprived of authorship and influence. “This was supposed to be the Putin model,” Hanna Notte, the director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and the author of a forthcoming book on Russian foreign policy, told me. “The irony is, now that it’s Trump who is carrying it out, it only exposes the limits of Russian power.”

Before the war, Russia saw Iran as an important part of its larger project to create alternative alliances and centers of power. The so-called North-South Transport Corridor is a joint project to link Russian and Iranian ports with those in India to move goods and freight while bypassing U.S. sanctions. Last year, Iran signed a free-trade agreement with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, a sign that Moscow was continuing to extend its influence beyond the post-Soviet space. Russia and Iran also linked their two national payment systems, a test case in the Kremlin’s pursuit of “de-dollarization” deals with other nations. “I don’t know if you’d quite call Iran a partner, ally, or friend,” a foreign-policy source in Moscow said. “But it has been a valuable asset.”

In 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stalled, Russia and Iran deepened their military relationship, but only to a point. Russian forces relied on Iranian-supplied drones and related technology to compete on the battlefield and inflict damage on Ukrainian cities; these days, Russia has set up extensive drone production at home, making more advanced models than the Iranians could provide, and so it doesn’t need Iran’s help in the way it once did. Last year, Moscow and Tehran signed a wide-ranging treaty, known as a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” but the agreement did not contain explicit security provisions. (A similar pact that Russia signed with North Korea in 2024, by comparison, does stipulate that the two countries would aid each other in the event of an attack.)

Still, Khamenei’s death represented Russia’s third loss of an important geopolitical client in a little over a year: in December, 2024, Bashar al-Assad, a longtime Russian ally, whom the Kremlin had protected to varying degrees for more than a decade, was forced from power by rebel militias (he’s now thought to be living in an exclusive gated community in Moscow); a year later, Maduro, Putin’s principal ally in South America, was captured by the U.S. Both former leaders were, like Khamenei, essential to Russia’s efforts to bypass existing multilateral frameworks, governing everything from trade to security, that the Kremlin had viewed as the domain of the U.S. It was as if Putin’s project to undermine the world order was being blown apart by an even greater disruption.

The result is that Russia not only looks like a second-order power but one that is, perhaps unexpectedly, longing for the bygone world of rules, norms, and institutions. “We have all lost what we call international law,” Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said in response to the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran. The foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, called on the U.S. to “explain its plans and how these correspond with the rules that essentially existed earlier.” As the Moscow foreign-policy source put it, “The current paradigm seems to be that the U.S. does what it wants, and no one else, Russia included, can do much about it.”

Since 2022, Russia’s goals of achieving military and political victory in Ukraine have, in truth, consumed nearly the whole of the country’s efforts and interests on the international stage. “The outcome of that war will represent the ultimate verdict on Russian power and how it is seen in the world,” Notte said. “By definition, that means that other theatres and conflicts end up deprioritized.” Trump is seen in Moscow as Russia’s best hope for delivering a favorable outcome in Ukraine. That still remains Putin’s only real strategy: keep up the fight and keep increasing the costs for both Ukraine and Europe until Trump brings them to their senses. “Our leadership is so focussed on the question of Ukraine, everything else looks secondary in comparison,” the Moscow foreign-policy source said. “If there remains any chance at all that Trump can help with Ukraine, that’s enough of an argument not to create problems for yourself in other areas.”

A day after Putin denounced Khamenei’s killing, Peskov expressed “deep disappointment” that U.S. talks with Iran had failed, while also making it clear that Russia “highly values the mediation efforts of the United States” in Ukraine. Russia is reportedly maintaining some of its commitments to Iran, providing the regime with intelligence for targeting U.S. forces and installations in the Middle East. “If the U.S. helps Ukraine with this, I don’t see why Russia can’t do the same,” the Moscow foreign-policy source said. But, they added, “it’s obvious the Kremlin doesn’t want to greatly upset Trump, and will err on playing it safe in avoiding red lines.”

In the meantime, Russia is pursuing whatever advantages it can from the war in Iran. The U.S. is burning through its stock of air-defense interceptors, one of the most crucial weapons for Ukraine—the more that are fired over the skies of the Middle East, the less there are to defend those above Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Dnipro. Khamenei’s son Mojtaba has been appointed Iran’s new Supreme Leader, but whatever political regime survives the war will likely be more vulnerable than ever. “A weak, unstable, battered Iran is exactly the kind of state that will need Russia, and China, all the more,” Notte said. “There’s much for Russia not to like about this war, but seeing as it happened they want to reap the maximum benefits.”

Above all, the war is yielding enormous profits for Russia on the global energy markets. Around a third of Russia’s budget depends on oil and gas sales. Before the bombing began, oil was trading below seventy dollars a barrel; it later spiked to nearly a hundred and twenty, though it has since settled at around ninety dollars. Apart from crude-oil prices, Russia’s exports avoid the bottleneck currently choking the Strait of Hormuz, by travelling via the Bosphorus or through overland pipelines. Earlier this winter, China and India were demanding a discount of between twenty and thirty dollars a barrel on Russian crude, a reflection of sanctions and shipping risks; now, with Russia’s sudden reëmergence as an essential supplier, its oil has been trading at a premium in some markets. Alexandra Prokopenko, a former adviser at Russia’s central bank and a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, told me that, if current prices hold, Russia stands to net an additional three and a half billion dollars in revenue a month—as much as a third of the estimated total monthly cost of the war in Ukraine.

Russian oil supply is also essential to Trump, who desperately wants to avoid a prolonged and painful rise in energy prices. Last week, he granted India a temporary waiver from U.S. sanctions on Russian oil. Prokopenko said that the move contained an important message. “Before, the U.S. was very careful to coördinate sanctions policy with Western partners,” she reflected. “Now it just acts on its own.” Moreover, she added, “if you start to dilute the sanctions regime in one place, why not do it in another?”

On Monday, Trump and Putin had a phone call to discuss the war in Iran. Hours before the call, Putin had warned publicly that, because of stalled traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, the world was on the brink of a major energy crisis. Now he was offering to help broker a peace deal with Iran. Trump later said that he told Putin, “You could be more ​helpful by getting the Ukraine-Russia war over with.” At the same time, Trump announced that, to address energy supplies, he plans to ease sanctions on “some countries.” It appeared that Putin had won another exchange with Trump. But, Notte told me, a basic truth remains, with unpleasant implications in Moscow. “Trump doesn’t really ask Putin what he thinks,” she said. “He just acts as he likes.”

The windfall from the energy trade may not ultimately change much for Russia’s strategic position. Its most pressing economic issues are inflation and the outsized role of military industry, neither of which can be solved by extra revenues alone. Prokopenko told me, “The Russian economy is stagnating not because there isn’t money but, rather, because it has become wrapped in knots due to the war in Ukraine.” Not long ago, Prokopenko thought that Putin could face an economic reckoning in early 2027. Whatever relief the war in Iran brings will be temporary. “He got lucky,” she said. “Maybe he can put that off a while longer.” ♦