March 25, 2022
by Warren L. Nelson
Under direction from the Supreme Leader, the Islamic Republic has decided to side with Russia in the war on Ukraine—though there are many in the establishment who profoundly disagree.
Many in the establishment, not to mention the general public, feel the regime has totally abandoned Ayatollah Khomeini’s firm neutrality policy expressed in the slogan, “Neither East Now West,” which has completely disappeared from the revolutionary vocabulary in recent years.
Many are complaining that the regime has made itself subservient to Russia and China. Worse, many are saying Iran gets no benefit from nuzzling up to Russia and China. At least the Americans, they say, recognized the Shah’s regime as the chief power in the region, while China and Russia just ignore that topic.
Ali Motahari, a former deputy speaker of the Majlis, criticized state broadcasting for reporting as if it were “the mouthpiece of a Russian colony.”
In the month since Russia invaded Ukraine, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi has made reference to the conflict in several speeches. He has refused to label it a war or an invasion, adhering to Moscow’s orders to its media. He has also embraced Russia’s view that the conflict is all the fault of the Americans for provoking Russia by trying to make Ukraine a member of NATO.
The official line is comprised of two parts. The first says the conflict is the fault of the Americans. The second says that the Islamic Republic opposes war as a matter of policy. Khamenehi emphasizes the first and mentions the second only in passing. The Foreign Ministry emphasizes the second and barely mentions the first. President Raisi sounds both points, but with more emphasis on the Khamenehi line and what he calls the ”evil policies” of the United States.
The Foreign Ministry seems to have prevailed when it came to a vote in the UN General Assembly condemning Russia for invading Ukraine. The vote was 141-to-5 with 34 abstentions and 13 absentees. Iran abstained, although based on Khamenehi’s arguments it should have joined Syria, North Korea, Belarus and Eritrea in backing Russia.
(Former President Mahmud Ahmadi-nejad once again broke with the regime, tweeting Ukrainians with praise for their “resistance” and saying the Iranian people are “standing by you.”)
On social media, it has become the norm for commentaries to denounce Russia by citing czarist Russia’s seizure of Iranian territory in the Caucasus in the early 1800s and Soviet Russia’s occupation of parts of northwestern Iran even after World War II.
One problem with the anti-war declaration is that the Islamic Republic does not really oppose war. It continued the Iran-Iraq War for five years after Baghdad accepted a UN-proposed ceasefire and Iraqi troops had been expelled from Iran. And Iran continues supporting wars in Syria and Yemen today.
But the two-point official position on Ukraine seems to have brought a modicum of peace within the government.
Sadeq Zibakalam, a prominent Reformist commentator, said phobia toward the West and “blind ideological enmity” kept many Iranian officials from having a realistic understanding of the Ukraine crisis.
Faezeh Hashemi, daughter of the late President Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani was blunter. In a taped interview, she said, “We have auctioned off our national interests to the East so that we can oppose the West for no clear reason. We pay ransoms to the East so that we might not be alone in the world. True, they have sometimes supported Iran, but they have benefited more than Iran. We are constantly giving concessions to the East with our soil, with our fish, with the Caspian Sea, and with contracts, the contents of which have been kept secret. We are selling our homeland for the sake of foreign policy, and [in doing so] we have not moved within the framework of our national interests.”
The government has also conscripted the war for other propaganda purposes. For example, it says the US-sponsored crisis has provided an opportunity for Saudi Arabia to execute 81 regime opponents, about half of them Shias—ignoring the fact that the Saudis have never shied away from executing opponents and Shias in the past.
It has also asserted that the Americans started the war so that it could sell more weapons to Ukraine and make a profit off the war. The Americans are indeed delivering huge stocks of weapons to Ukraine—but that is grant aid, not sales. The US Congress has thus far approved $13.6 billion to support Ukraine, including $3.5 billion in weapons deliveries and $4.2 billion in humanitarian aid.
The regime has also conscripted the war in Ukraine to say it proves Westerners are racist since they do not support the dark-skinned Yemenis but make a big issue when white Europeans are threatened. (In Yemen, the West opposes the dark-skinned Houthis, but supports the dark-skinned Yemenis in the government that the Houthis ousted.)
The one direct involvement of Iran in the war came from the fact that 4,200 Iranians lived in Ukraine, most of them as students. The Iranian government said it was moving them to neighboring countries and then sent planes to Eastern Europe to pick them up and bring them home. But there haven’t been enough announced flights to bring even a quarter home. It remains unknown whether any Iranians are trapped in Ukraine or whether those evacuated to the West have refused the offer of flights home and stayed in Eastern Europe.
One Iranian is known to have died. The Iranian embassy said Mohammad-Hossain Shoostarian, 51, died of a heart attack as he was trying to flee from Kharkiv.
Iran has closed its embassy in Kyiv and moved its diplomats to next-door Moldova.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted countries all around the world to impose sanctions on Russia. Castellum, a sanctions-monitoring database, says Russia has now bypassed Iran to become the most sanctioned country in the world today. As of March 8, it said Moscow was under 5,532 sanctions, compared to 3,616 for Iran, 2,608 for third place Syria and 2,077 for fourth place North Korea. The country imposing the largest number of sanctions on Russia is Switzerland with 568, followed by the EU with 518, France with 512, Canada with 454, Australia with 413 with the US far down at 243 sanctions.
It should be noted that mere numbers mean little. In these counts, an American sanction freezing the US-based assets of one named Iranian official who has no US-based assets counts the same as the US sanction forbidding most imports from Iran.
The Islamic Republic has so far avoided talking about the damage the war may do to Iran. Iran is having to import more wheat, maize, barley and other foods this year because of the drought. Russia and Ukraine are the world’s two biggest exporters of wheat (a quarter of all wheat traded globally) and are major exporters of other food crops, including a fifth of all maize traded internationally. Iran produces only 10 percent of its vegetable oil needs, and last year got 37 percent of its sunflower oil from Ukraine. Ukraine cannot ship any products right now because of Russian Navy actions off its Black Sea ports. Food prices are surging internationally. Iran is going to pay a price for the war, although the scale of that price remains unknown.
The Islamic Republic has boasted recently of selling more fruit and other goods to Russia and selling them for rubles, not dollars. But Russia doesn’t pay cash; its importers routinely settle after 45 days. And the ruble has been crashing since the war’s start, so Iranian farmers may find themselves selling at a loss.
The day after the Russians invaded, a crowd spontaneously gathered outside the Ukrainian Embassy in Tehran to shout their support for Ukraine. The police soon dispersed them, although they posed no threat to the embassy. At the Russian Embassy, Tehran police formed a cordon to prevent any protesters from even gathering there.
In an oddball comment, Oil Minister Javad Oji said Iran could supply natural gas to Europe if Europe decides to stop buying Russian gas. But that is nonsense. Iran has no gas pipelines that go to Europe and it has not a single site where natural gas can be liquefied to be shipped by sea to Europe.