Putin is going to travel. It should be a warning – VG

Russia’s president will finally travel.

The airspace is closed to him in many places, but the trip goes to Tehran.

There he will meet the presidents of Iran and Turkey, Ebrahim Raisi and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Speculation abounds about why this particular three-leaf clover, according to the Kremlin, will meet on Tuesday.

What is certain is that Vladimir Putin needs friends. He does not have too many of them anymore.

When the Ukraine invasion was up in the UN, only four countries out of 193 UN members supported Russia; Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Eritrea.

Although many large and populous nations abstained, they did not openly support Moscow.

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The funny thing is that the news of the Tehran meeting came the day after the United States had announced that it has information that Iran will supply Russia with weapons – more specifically drones.

So now Putin is going to Iran – on one of his few known trips abroad since the corona struck and probably the first trip outside the former Soviet Union since he ordered the invasion of Ukraine.

How does Iran react to the Ukraine war? The official version is that Tehran understands the Russian reaction to NATO enlargement to the east, but at the same time is opposed to a military solution to the crisis. Iran is thus neutral.

But at the same time, the sympathies of the Iranian leadership are well known.

Iran’s relationship with the United States is not very cordial, especially since 2018 when then-President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the nuclear deal with Iran.

In addition, the US sanctions have made Russia one of the few places from which Iran can obtain military equipment.

President Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan thus claims that Iran is preparing to supply Moscow with several hundred drones – and will already this July train the Russians to use them.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry has denied this, but Washington insists that this shows that Iran is willing to support Russia’s war in Ukraine.

According to the Kremlin, Putin will also have a meeting with Turkish President Erdogan in Tehran. NATO member Turkey has close ties to both Moscow and Kyiv and most recently acted as a mediator between the two countries in the dispute over the blockade of grain that Ukraine wants to export.

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As is well known, Turkey is NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg’s headache, not least because they have tried to put sticks in the wheels of Sweden’s and Finland’s membership.

Erdogan & co have condemned the Russian attack on Ukraine, but have not imposed any sanctions – other than blocking the airspace of military and civilian planes bringing troops from Russia to Syria. In addition, Ukraine uses Turkish Bayraktar drones in the fight against the Russian invaders.

Maybe it’s not just weapons Putin intends to discuss in Tehran. Iran has gold and other natural resources and is strategically located close to both the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea.

Thanks to its energetic and combative soldiers, Ukraine managed to stop Russia from capturing Kyiv.

They won the short war. But now the long war is going on in the east. It will cost lives, weapons and money.

Putin is celebrating that Russia has taken control of Luhansk, which together with Donetsk forms the Donbas area, which the president has stated he will “liberate”.

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A few days before the invasion in February 2022, Putin declared the two “People’s Republics” independent states, and the goal is to secede them from Ukraine, for example, just as Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014.

Of course, Ukraine can not accept that.

As recently as this week, Foreign Minister Kuleba stated that it is impossible for Kyiv to hand over any part of its country to Russia as part of a peace agreement.

Therefore, it is important that Kyiv gets the necessary weapons from the West to be able to strike back.

But the question is whether Ukraine’s friends – that is, first and foremost NATO – will be as patient as Putin is.

He has already been involved in the Donbas conflict for eight years, and despite Western sanctions, he has absolutely no plans to give up.

Now there are forces in Russia that believe that the title “president” is not enough for Putin. They want to make him “ruler.”

His trip to Iran indicates that Russia’s weapons stockpile is beginning to be depleted, and that Moscow will buy modern equipment to wage war against Ukrainian soldiers equipped with Western-produced weapons.

It should be a warning to NATO to keep up with the times.

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