Second, the discussion of that event shows us that Iran as a nation took a long time becoming a trusted friend of Russia, but now the warm feelings towards our Southern neighbor have manifested themselves in full.
Speaking about plots and murders of foreign leaders, Russia does not have to be the only nation in love with conspiracies. India, in this particular case, seems to be on the same wavelength. A random hit among that nation’s media gives us a typical example of such feelings. My Delhi colleague from The Hindu tells us:
‘Given the increased tensions in West Asia and the gung-ho attitude of Israel, with open American support, suspicion will be raised about the Israeli hand. Tel Aviv has denied this and distanced itself from the crash, but neither the United States nor Israel have any credibility left for the world to accept their innocence without serious cross-checks’.
The Israeli version seems to be obvious to most Russians, too, and so is the idea that the real target of murderers was Moscow, Iran’s friend and partner. But there are other ideas about that real target, and some people here did not miss a chance to state it.
Marat Bashirov, a well-known political blogger, reminds us that on May 13thIran and India have signed an agreement on the use of the port of Chabahar. That harbor gives India a trading route to Afghanistan and Central Asia, avoiding Karachi and Gwadar in Pakistan. The price of the contract is considerable, being around 370 million US dollars.
There is Mr. Vedant Patel, a man with a very Indian name, in the US State Department. That man, notes Bashirov, has threatened India with sanctions right after May 13th , saying that anyone who deals with Iran has to consider ‘potential risk of sanctions’. The US does not like any transport routes not under American control, says Bashirov, ending his piece with an ominous ‘that was fast, not a week has passed since that threat has been made’.
Being a great admirer of Robert Ludlum’s spy series, I’ve consumed enough of fiction about most daring and sinister plots, managed by Washington or international terrorists. But today’s realities are stronger than fiction. For the majority of people in Russia, it’s us who are the target. You cannot blame suspicious Russians for making parallels with yet another recent similar event, that is the attempt on the Prime Minister of Slovakia, Mr. Robert Fico. That man, winning the October 2023 election, has a reputation of Russia’s friend. He had been seriously wounded, only days ago, ostensibly by a deranged old man with wild ideas. And, naturally, nobody in Russia thinks of it as of a coincidence, just as nobody believes in President Kennedy’s murder by a lonely and looney gunman.
The globalist elites have turned to direct terror against anyone who supports Russia, says Ilya Golovnev of the hardline Russian website The Tsargrad. That’s an attempt to scare the world and a signal to our country, adds he.
Has the world really come to the stage when such things are possible and are almost in the open? Of course it has. We have witnessed, recently, a deliberate destruction of an underwater pipeline that was to carry Russian gas to Germany, and nobody thinks it was not the US standing behind it. Or look at atrocities perpetrated by Israel or Ukraine against civilians, which are suddenly supposed to be acceptable by all the Western standards. The fight for Western survival as a dominant force in the world is becoming too desperate for comfort, and there currently seems to be no power to stop it.
Having travelled by a helicopter only once in my life, I personally think that the Iranian fatal accident was just that, an accident, and that the problem is not in the American helicopter (they all shake like hell). But, anyway, that tragic case gave Russians the chance to review the whole range of our ties with Iran and see that this is really a good friend of ours.
Only 10 years ago or so, the Russian public did not think that Iran is important, and that it’s a serious global power. Now we know better. Sources say that experts in Moscow have been studying carefully the Iranian way to survive and produce new technologies, being under sanctions for years, and the said experts have developed a healthy respect to Iran as a result. Two nation’s trade may stay low and even go down, as they do, but there are indications that Tehran have been actively interacting with Moscow in the military field. There were joint naval patrols near the Straits of Hormuz recently, together with China. “A reliable friend and ally’, that’s what Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said about President Raisi in a condolences message. To remind, Putin have been to Tehran five times in his tenure.
Most Russian experts are assuring the public that the Russo-Iranian alliance will stay even with the new future leadership, and that the benefits of that alliance are too obvious to miss. Simply speaking, both nations got stronger by slowly building up their contacts. And that simple truth drowns the cautious voices of people in Moscow, reminding us of protests in Tehran in 2022-23.
What’s most interesting is the slow and gradual realization, far as the public is concerned, of the fact that Iran is a very special nation, deserving attention and admiration. Here we have to remember, that since the Iranian revolution of 1979, we were out of touch with each other, and that meant, among other things, very few people-to-people contacts.
There was a gradual thawing of that iceberg during the domestic war against jihadism in the early 2000-s, mostly in the Russian republic of Chechnya, and then there was our close collaboration during the war in Syria, starting from 2015. Incidentally, Syria was the cause that brought our states together like nothing else. That’s how Russians have discovered that Iran is, basically, anti-jihadist and never aided destructive forces in Russia or anywhere else. Today a lot of people are reminding the public of that reality.
Ms. Karine Gevorkyan is, probably, the most passionate of such fans of that nation. Being one of the top Iranists of Russia, she is telling the public, today, that our neighbor is a nation with ancient and wonderful culture. Look at the royal lilies of France, she says, which were appropriated from the Achaemenides dynasty. Or you may think a lion is a symbol of the UK, but that rather is a bulldog. While a lion firmly belongs to ancient Persia, and you can see a lot of these stone beasts almost everywhere in Iran. She adds: you may see a picture in today’s Tehran media, showing that lion and the Russian bear sitting side by side and feeling comfortable in each other’s company.
Dmitry Kosyrev is a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com