Partners, Not Allies
Russia is making money. China is protecting its summit. Neither is protecting Iran.
When the US and Israel struck Iran on February 28, the two powers with the most to lose from Tehran’s collapse did almost nothing. That is not a coincidence. It is a strategy. And it tells you more about the limits of the Russia-China-Iran relationship than any formal alliance document ever could.
Moscow condemned the strikes. Beijing called for restraint. Both pushed for an emergency UN Security Council session. Then they largely stopped. No military intervention. No serious material support. No meaningful attempt to shield a country both had signed strategic partnership agreements with. The question is not whether this represents a betrayal. The question is what it reveals about what those partnerships were ever actually worth.
Russia: Enough to Survive, Not Enough to Win
Russia’s most significant move in the first ten days of the war was covert. On March 6, reports emerged that Moscow has been feeding Iran satellite imagery and real-time locations of US warships and aircraft. The data most likely flows through the Khayyam satellite, which Russia built and launched for Tehran in 2022. It captures images at roughly one-meter resolution, sharp enough to track individual warships in near real time. That is not trivial assistance. But it has not changed the outcome of a single engagement. Washington has brushed off Moscow’s involvement entirely, and no specific Iranian strike has been tied back to Russian intelligence. The satellite data tells Iran where American ships are. It does not help Iran stop American bombs. That gap between knowing and being able to act is precisely the measure of how degraded Tehran’s military capacity has become. Russia is giving Iran situational awareness in a war Iran can no longer fight.
The arms picture tells a similar story. Russia had been arming Iran before the war, but on a peacetime schedule for a conflict that arrived early. A 48-unit Su-35 deal worth 6.5 billion dollars was spread across deliveries from 2026 to 2028, meaning few if any aircraft had arrived when the bombs started falling. A secret December 2025 agreement for 500 Verba MANPADS launchers was designed to hit low-flying aircraft, not B-2 bombers at altitude. Reports of S-400 components reaching Iran are undercut by Iran’s actual air defense performance, which suggests the delivered systems either never arrived in functional form or were simply not built for the kind of war being fought.
Russia was arming Iran for a different fight at a different time. What Tehran needed in late February was not what Moscow had delivered.
The January 2025 Russia-Iran Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty was written without a mutual defense clause. On purpose. Russian officials made this explicit in public statements: the treaty does not require either party to defend the other. The Kremlin added that Tehran had not directly asked for military help. Whether that last claim is accurate is almost beside the point. The architecture of the relationship was designed from the start to give Moscow maximum flexibility and minimum obligation.
The pattern is precise. Russia gives Iran enough to stay in the fight. Not enough to change the outcome.
Moscow’s Windfall
To understand why, look at the numbers. Before February 28, Russia was facing a serious fiscal problem. Urals crude had sunk to 40 dollars per barrel under sanctions. The January budget shortfall hit a record 1.7 trillion rubles. The sovereign wealth fund’s liquid assets had fallen to 52.2 billion dollars, half their pre-Ukraine invasion level.
Then the war started. Brent crude jumped from 72.87 dollars on February 27 to 92.69 by March 7, a 28 percent spike in one week. More consequentially, Russia’s discount to the global benchmark disappeared. For months Moscow had been selling oil at 10 to 13 dollars below Brent. It is now charging a 4 to 5 dollar premium. The competition is gone. Venezuelan output collapsed after Maduro was captured in January. Iranian crude is blockaded. Russia is, for the moment, the only major supplier of heavy crude available on the global market. Moscow has publicly said it is ready to ship more to China and India.
Sanctions are cracking in parallel. US Treasury Secretary Bessent gave India a 30-day waiver to buy approximately 120 to 140 million barrels of Russian crude worth roughly 3 billion dollars. He then floated the idea of lifting more Russian oil sanctions to compensate for lost Iranian supply. The EU’s planned March 18 ban on Russian gas imports is running into resistance from Hungary and Slovakia as European gas prices rise 60 percent in a week following the halt of Qatari LNG production.
Sustained oil at 80 dollars gives Moscow real fiscal breathing room. If the Hormuz closure drags on, prices could reach 108 dollars. That is a substantial boost to a war economy under pressure.
The Ukraine dimension compounds this. More US-made Patriot interceptors were fired over the Middle East in three days than Ukraine received in total since 2022. Every Tomahawk that hits an Iranian target is one unavailable for Kyiv. Moscow is taking full advantage. Overnight missile strikes on Ukraine reached their highest intensity in over three years during late February. Russian officials have openly said they hope Washington gets stuck in Iran and loses focus on Ukraine. Putin meanwhile placed back-to-back phone calls to Gulf leaders including MBS and Mohammed bin Zayed on March 2, positioning himself as a potential regional mediator while carefully avoiding any public criticism of the US by name. That keeps his line to Trump open on Ukraine.
Russia is not saving Iran. It is profiting from the war Iran is fighting.
China: The Summit Comes First
China’s position is structurally more complicated. Approximately 45 percent of its oil imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Qatar provides 30 percent of its LNG. When Iran declared the strait closed on March 2, daily tanker crossings collapsed from 153 to 13. Dozens of Chinese vessels became stranded inside the Persian Gulf. This is not an abstraction. This is Beijing’s core economic vulnerability made suddenly and acutely visible.
China responded on three tracks simultaneously. It went directly to Tehran and told senior Iranian officials not to hit oil and LNG tankers. By March 6, Beijing was brokering safe passage arrangements for crude carriers and Qatari LNG ships. A Chinese-linked bulk carrier made it through the strait on March 7 after broadcasting its ownership over open channels, a tactic no one had attempted before. At the same time, Beijing ordered every major domestic refiner to halt diesel and gasoline exports immediately, cutting off fuel supply to a significant portion of Southeast Asia. And it began drawing on strategic petroleum reserves estimated at 1.39 billion barrels, supplemented by roughly 46 million barrels of Iranian crude sitting in floating storage across Asia and the additional inventory Beijing had been stockpiling throughout 2025 at approximately one million barrels per day above actual consumption.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was the most active diplomat of the war’s first week. He spoke with at least seven counterparts across Iran, Russia, Israel, France, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Beijing announced a special envoy to the region and pointed to its 2023 brokering of the Saudi-Iran normalization as proof of its diplomatic capacity.
But all of this diplomatic activity operates within one hard constraint. Beijing will not take any action that puts the Xi-Trump summit at risk. That meeting runs from March 31 to April 2. Trade, Taiwan, and the broader shape of US-China competition are all on the table. Wang Yi’s public comments about the United States have been notably warm. He called 2026 a landmark year for both countries. Washington knows it has leverage. Beijing’s diplomacy on Iran is real. But it is secondary to what happens at the end of March.
There are accusations that China supplied Iran with CM-302 supersonic anti-ship missiles, designed precisely for the kind of anti-naval warfare Tehran needs right now. Beijing denied it. More quietly and more consequentially, China has maintained its restrictions on rare earth exports for military end use since April 2025, a ban never lifted even when broader export controls were suspended as part of a trade truce with Washington. Rare earths are critical for precision-guided munitions: guidance systems, motors, sensors in smart bombs and missiles. The US is burning through these weapons faster than it can replace them. Restricting the raw materials needed to make more worsens a supply problem Washington is already managing carefully. That is not direct support for Iran. But it is the most precise illustration of where China actually stands: willing to constrain American military capacity at the margins, unwilling to do anything that costs Beijing at the table that matters more.
The most revealing signal from Beijing this week is internal. China’s military published a document analyzing lessons from the Iran war. The central finding: the deadliest threat comes from within. This is a direct reference to the depth of CIA and Mossad penetration of Iran’s military and political leadership before and during the conflict. For a government that treats internal security as its highest priority, the implication is deeply uncomfortable. China had been selling Iran surveillance technology for years, partly to help Tehran manage internal dissent and harden its security infrastructure. None of it was enough. If Iran’s defenses were insufficient, Beijing has to ask whether its own are.
A Bloc, or Three Countries Looking Out for Themselves
This war is the most serious test the Russia-China-Iran relationship has ever faced. The response has been more coordinated than anything produced during the 2003 Iraq War or the 2011 Libya intervention. In 2011, Russia and China abstained on UN Security Council Resolution 1973, allowing NATO’s intervention and Gaddafi’s eventual overthrow. Putin came to regard that abstention as a strategic error. In 2026, neither country allowed any legitimization of the US-Israeli operation at the UN level. Russia went further and began feeding intelligence to Tehran. These are real shifts.
But the core limitation has not changed. Russia cannot match the US-Israel coalition militarily. It does not have the resources to sustain Iran on its own. And Moscow and Beijing are not fully aligned. Russia pushed OPEC+ to increase production by 206,000 barrels per day starting in April, moving to fill the market gap left by Iran’s absence. China buys 87 percent of Iran’s crude exports and is scrambling to replace them. Russia’s primary concern is Ukraine. China’s primary concern is the Trump summit. Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Gulf states have created complications for both, since Saudi Arabia and the UAE are significant trading partners for Moscow and Beijing alike.
They are coordinating. In some ways more closely than before. But coordination in overlapping interests is not the same as a coherent bloc with shared obligations. Each is looking out for itself first. When interests converge, they work together. When they do not, they look away.
What the Partnership Is Worth
In less than a month, Xi sits down with Trump in Beijing. That summit will clarify how far China is willing to go, or not go, to defend what remains of its Iran relationship. If Beijing trades away its Iran position for concessions on trade or Taiwan, every government that has been told a partnership with China means something will take note. And the rare earths restriction, the one quiet lever Beijing kept in place throughout, will look less like principled solidarity and more like a tool China used when it was costless and will quietly lift the moment Washington asks.
Russia faces a parallel problem. Moscow has now watched the US remove Maduro in January and Khamenei in February, two leaders it had formal strategic relationships with. If a third partner falls and Russia’s response amounts to satellite data and public statements, the message is legible to any government currently weighing its options. A security partnership with Moscow is worth what Moscow decides it is worth on the day it is tested. That calculus may not matter immediately. It will matter the next time Russia or China tries to convince a government that there is a credible alternative to the Western-led order.
The Russia-China-Iran relationship is real. It produces coordination, intelligence sharing, economic support, and diplomatic cover. What it does not produce is the one thing that would make it a genuine bloc: the willingness to absorb serious costs to defend a partner under pressure. That willingness is the only test that matters. So far, neither Moscow nor Beijing has shown any sign of passing it.