WARSAW: Bashar al-Assad, Nicolas Maduro and now Iran´s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the last 18 months, Russian President Vladimir Putin has lost several key foreign allies -- and there is little that the Kremlin, bogged down in Ukraine, can do about it.
Tehran has stood by as one of Russia´s closest backers throughout Moscow´s four-year offensive and the Kremlin had earlier called for restraint amid reports of imminent US military action in Iran.
But as Washington and Israel launched waves of air strikes on Saturday that martyred the Islamic republic´s longtime supreme leader Khamenei, Russia saw another key ally -- after the leaders of Syria and Venezuela -- toppled.
In January, US President Donald Trump ordered an attack in which US forces snatched Venezuela´s leftist leader Maduro.
Washington has also drawn close to Syria´s new authorities since the fall of al-Assad in late 2024 that dealt a major blow to Russia´s influence in the region.
Russia´s “Vladimir Putin will find himself in a difficult position,” Alexander Baunov, senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre, said on social media.
“Twice in two months, Putin has failed to fulfill the role of savior, at least of the life of an allied dictator. And the killer is his friend Trump,” Baunov wrote.
In 2025, replying to AFP´s question, Putin said he did “not even wish to discuss” the idea Israel might assassinate Iran´s Khamenei.
When the killing was confirmed by Iranian state television on Sunday, the Kremlin published a message with condolences that Putin had sent to Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian.
The Russian leader praised Khamenei as “an outstanding statesman” and said his “assassination” was “carried out in a cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law”.
But the Russian authorities have not officially announced any concrete assistance to Tehran.
A day before, amid the ongoing US and Israeli strikes, it was Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi who phoned Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, according to Moscow´s read-out of the call.
