The Spectator is wrong, Russia isn’t cheering the Iran-Israel war

Western commentators want to believe Moscow thrives on chaos—but this reveals more about their worldview than the actual strategy at play

You could almost hear the sharpening of pens in London and Washington the moment the first American warhead lit up the Persian sky last weekend. By the time the dust settled, Western analysts were already at their desks, explaining with fluent certainty how this was yet another opportunity for Russia to play its usual role: the jackal of geopolitics, circling crises not of its making and extracting every last drop of advantage from them.

Take Mark Galeotti’s piece in The Spectator on Monday. Here, in polished paragraphs and confident tone, we are served a familiar dish: Moscow as cynical opportunist, cheering from the sidelines while Tehran burns. The implication, never quite stated but omnipresent, is that Russia lacks any guiding principle other than spite. It is not a serious actor, merely a schemer.

But like much of the Western commentary on Russia, this narrative is more revealing of its author than its subject. It flattens Moscow’s aims, ignores its constraints, and reduces strategic calculation to pantomime villainy. Yes, Russia stands to benefit in some ways from the present mess — oil prices may rise, the Global South may take note of American aggression, and Washington could find itself overstretched. But to leap from this to a portrait of Putin gleefully stroking a cat as Tel Aviv and Tehran trade blows is not just lazy. It is unserious.

Galeotti claims Moscow can do little to help Iran and is instead scheming to extract gains. That may play well in Whitehall, but it misses the point. Russia’s caution is not weakness. It is calculation. For all its rhetoric, Moscow has no interest in this conflict spiralling into a region-wide inferno. A wider war threatens to destabilise the South Caucasus, the Caspian basin, and Central Asia — places where the Kremlin still holds real stakes. Chaos in the Persian Gulf might boost oil revenues, yes. But it could also light fires closer to home.

Nor is the Russia-Iran relationship as mercenary as Galeotti suggests. Certainly, it is not an alliance in the NATO sense. But neither is it a mere marriage of convenience. These are two powers who share a history of defying Western-imposed order, who have both endured regime-change efforts, and who align on the principle that the world should not be run from Washington. There is a deeper logic to their ties than drone shipments and sanction circumvention.

And what of Israel? Here is where the story gets more complicated, and more interesting. Russia has long valued its ties with the Jewish state. More than 1.5 million Russian speakers live there. Moscow and the IDF have worked hard to avoid accidental confrontation in Syria. Trade and cultural links run deep. This is not the stuff of slogans or soundbites. It is the quiet tissue of diplomacy, painstakingly maintained. That’s why Moscow walks a tightrope. And why simplistic takes about it “siding with Iran” fail the first test of credibility.

Yes, there has been clanging of the old gongs of defiance from the usual Russian quarters. Dmitri Medvedev, performing his current role as the Kremlin’s bad cop, mused aloud about supplying Iran with nuclear weapons. Before walking it back after Donald Trump replied directly. But this is theatre. The Foreign Ministry, by contrast, has been deliberately measured, warning against escalation but offering little more. That is no accident. Moscow is in no position to open another front.

But the bigger issue here is the tone of Western analysis itself. For too long, it has relied on a moral framework that casts Russia as incapable of strategic reason. In this view, Moscow does not act. It reacts. It does not plan. It plots. It does not seek order. It feeds on disorder. This is not analysis. It is theology. And it tells us more about the fears and habits of the West than about Russia’s real behaviour.

The truth is, the Kremlin would likely prefer a quiet Middle East. It has enough on its plate in Eastern Europe. It wants to keep energy prices high, yes, but not at the cost of an inferno in a region where it holds influence but not dominance. And while it may gain in the global south from Washington’s overreach, it also knows that instability can backfire.

Galeotti, and others like him, are not fools. But they are part of a commentariat trained to see Russia through a narrow lens. In that world, Moscow can never act prudently, only ruthlessly. It can never seek balance, only advantage. And it can never be a status quo power, only a spoiler.

This, of course, suits those who wish to explain away Western missteps as the cunning of the bear. But it makes for poor analysis.

In reality, the Kremlin is hedging bets, weighing costs, and looking for ways to enhance its position without lighting up more of its own backyard. That might not be heroic. But it’s hardly villainous.

So yes, there may be opportunity in crisis. But Russia, more than most, understands the price of chaos. It has lived through enough of it. And if Western commentators really want to understand the Kremlin, they might start by asking not what it wants to break — but what it wants to avoid. Because not every silence is indifference, and not every stillness means sleep.