On his third foreign outing since he took over as president in August 2021, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi visited Moscow this week. To his supporters, Raisi’s trip, on which he was accompanied by Iran’s foreign, oil, and economy ministers, is a turning point in Iranian-Russian relations, and those supporters might be right.
Hard-liners in Tehran—the advocates of a pro-Russia line—now hold all levers of power, and they are evidently determined to deepen relations with the Russians in a host of areas. No Iranian president since 1979 has made such frequent and consistent public calls for strategic ties with Moscow as Raisi. According to a former Iranian ambassador to Moscow, Seyed Mahmoud-Reza Sajjadi, after Russian President Vladimir Putin returned from a visit to Tehran in 2017, he remarked to his aides that “We have not visited one country but two countries. The country of [Supreme Leader] Ali Khamenei and the country of [President] Hassan Rouhani.”
While Iran’s most powerful man, Khamenei, has been unwavering in advocating for closer ties with Russia and China, Putin’s suggestion was clear: The government of Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had preferred to focus on mending relations with the West. By contrast, the Raisi team’s message to Putin, and Russian companies, is that Iran is serious about strengthening ties—and that no infighting within the regime will be allowed to derail this mission.
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