While Putin has condemned the Israeli strikes, he has yet to comment on the US attacks on Iranian nuclear sites though he last week called for calm and offered Moscow’s services as a mediator over the nuclear programme.
A senior source told Reuters that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi was due to deliver a letter from Khamenei to Putin, seeking the latter’s support.Iran has not been impressed with Russia’s support so far, Iranian sources told Reuters, and the country wants Putin to do more to back it against Israel and the United States. The sources did not elaborate on what assistance Tehran wanted.
The Kremlin said Putin would receive Araqchi but did not say what would be discussed.Araqchi was quoted by the state TASS news agency as saying that Iran and Russia were coordinating their positions on the current escalation in the Middle East.
Putin has repeatedly offered to mediate between the US and Iran, and said he had conveyed Moscow’s ideas on resolving the conflict to them while ensuring Iran’s continued access to civil nuclear energy.
The Kremlin chief last week refused to discuss the possibility that Israel and the US would kill Khamenei.
Putin said Israel had given Moscow assurances that Russian specialists helping to build two more reactors at the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran would not be hurt in air strikes.
Russia, a longstanding ally of Tehran, plays a role in Iran’s nuclear negotiations with the West as a veto-wielding UN Security Council member and a signatory to an earlier nuclear deal Trump abandoned during his first term in 2018.
But Putin, whose army is fighting a major war of attrition in Ukraine for the fourth year, has so far shown little appetite in public for diving into a confrontation with the United States over Iran just as Trump seeks to repair ties with Moscow.
