Putin, Pezeshkian Reaffirm Moscow-Tehran Alliance Amid US-Iran War
Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian with Russia's President Vladimir Putin on Sept. 1, 2026 in Bishkek at SCO Summit. Photo Credit: Kremlin.ru
Key Takeaways:
- On Sept. 1 in Bishkek, Pezeshkian thanked Putin for UN and sanctions-era backing and called ties “strategic” against U.S. “unilateralism”; Putin pledged solidarity, trade, and “goods that you need” after a fragile June U.S.–Iran memorandum collapsed.
- The meeting followed the Aug. 30 U.S. Larak launcher strike and Iranian fire on U.S. sites in Jordan; Tehran still squeezes Hormuz while Washington has restored a naval blockade. Pezeshkian said Iran will reciprocate only if the U.S. returns to the June deal.
- Reports cited Russian satellite and other intel aiding Iranian targeting in the Gulf; Russia’s Bishkek team included Lavrov, Overchuk, and energy, transport, and military-technical officials.
ranian President Masud Pezeshkian thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for Moscow’s position on the war in the Middle East, in their first meeting since the conflict broke out in February.
Russia has supplied Iran with satellite images and other intelligence, helping Tehran target US facilities in the Persian Gulf in recent months, according to reports. The two allies have also expanded military and economic ties in recent years.
“We appreciate and thank you for your positions at every stage, both during the period when the fighting and acts of aggression were taking place and under normal circumstances, when the United States was imposing sanctions on us, both at the United Nations and in international forums,” Pezeshkian told Putin at a meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Kyrgyzstan on September 1.
Pezeshkian described Iran’s relationship with Russia as “strategic” and said Tehran and Moscow can work together to resist what he called US “unilateralism.”
The meeting came after a new flareup in the six-month war. The United States said it attacked Iranian rocket launchers on a small island in the Strait of Hormuz on August 30, prompting Tehran to retaliate by hitting US military targets in Jordan.
Tehran and Washington signed a memorandum of understanding in June aimed at ending the war, but the deal soon unraveled.
Since then, Washington has reimposed a naval blockade on Iran and intensified economic pressure on Tehran. Iran has maintained its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, a key artery for global oil and gas supplies, and effectively closed the waterway to international maritime traffic.
At the SCO summit, Pezeshkian said Tehran remained ready for diplomacy, but only if Washington returned to its obligations under the June agreement.
“If the United States returns to its commitments under the aforementioned memorandum of understanding, the Islamic Republic of Iran will immediately reciprocate,” Pezeshkian said.
Putin, meanwhile, said Moscow stood in solidarity with the Iranian people in the fight for their interests.
The Russian president also said that Moscow and Tehran will maintain their economic and trade ties despite the current military and political environment.
“We welcomed the signing of the Iranian-American cease-fire memorandum in June of this year, but unfortunately, the cease-fire proved unstable and too fragile,” Putin said. “In this difficult period, we’re trying to provide you with the necessary support, we talked with you about this, we’re supplying you with goods that you need.”
The Russian delegation in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, included Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Deputy Prime Minister Aleksei Overchuk, and senior officials responsible for energy, transport, economic development, military-technical cooperation, and nuclear energy.
Putin has held a series of bilateral talks in Bishkek, including with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Kazakh President Qasym-Dzhomart Toqaev. He also has meetings scheduled with the leaders of other countries, including Tajikistan, Turkey, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan on September 1.
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September 2, 2026
By Paul Goble
Key Takeaways:
His proposed map: Caspian and Black as “Russian seas,” Kaliningrad as “Rusgorod,” the Kurils as the “Russian Islands,” and—for symmetry—the Arctic as the “Russian Ocean,” framed as answering Azerbaijani, German/Polish/Lithuanian, and Japanese name wars.
The piece casts unapologetic naming as Lebensraum-style substance over Soviet form and as better than waiting to be a “bandit’s victim”; it is commentary, not a Kremlin decree.
In a world where it is increasingly difficult to separate satire from reality, Sergey Aksyonov, a Svobodnaya Pressa commentator, argues that Putin should follow Trump’s action in renaming Lake Ontario Lake America by giving Russian place names to all places Russia has an interest, thus leaving the US with “only a lake in Canada.”
According to the writer, by changing the name of the lake to its north, “Washington has effectively staked a claim to the body of water straddling the US-Canada border, rendering it more American and Canadian” and raising the question: “Does expansion begin with changes in names?” (svpressa.ru/world/article/529886/).
The first reaction of Russians to Trump’s move is to oppose it, he continues. After all, they have a long “tradition of sympathizing with downtrodden nations and peoples” and thus are naturally inclined to be “indignant about Trump’s boorish and brazen habit of barging in where he isn’t wanted.”
“But,” Aksyonov says, isn’t it worthwhile for Russians to “take closer look at this approach” and possibly adopt it? Isn’t it possible that Trump’s brazenness is what makes him strong because he “doesn’t hesitate, cower, or hold back out of concern for how others may judge him?”
After all, isn’t it “better to be a bandit than to be a bandit’s victim?” given that “victim states do not survive” or even prosper. “Russia is no vast precisely because alongside its idealistic intelligentsia, there have always been tough statemen and military commanders who, devoid of sentimentality, have raised the Russian flag and not taken it down.”
Russia has been solicitous to its neighbors, Aksyonov says; but now they “perceiving Moscow as weakening have become increasingly brazen” in their behavior including about names and “a new approach is needed,” one that Trump may have shown the way forward to the Kremlin.
As examples of what Moscow might do, he suggests “the Caspian Sea could be renamed the Russian Sea,” because after all, Russia has the largest share of it and because some of its neighbors such as Azerbaijan are busily renaming places inside of today’s Russian Federation. And it could do the same with the Black Sea.
But it would be even more useful to give all the places in Kaliningrad Russian names given that Germany, Poland and Lithuania have been doing the same thing about that Russian federal subject on their own. And Aksyonov suggests that perhaps the time has come to “stake a new claim to our exclave” by calling “’Rusgorod.’”
“Changing a Soviet-era place name has its downsides…. Yet, if one views this innovation as a stage in the struggle for the people’s *Lebensraum*—their living space—the change is acceptable: the Bolsheviks always prioritized substance over form. Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin—the “All-Union Elder”—is unlikely to take offense.”
Thus, “it would be especially fitting to give a Russian name to the country’s opposite extremity: the Kurils.” They should be called “the Russian Islands. even though their current name is historically grounded … renaming them now is a valid move to counter the resurgence of Japanese militarism.”
The naming of one’s own territories—and those of others—asserted by a nation of its own volition and in defiance of objections from other countries or international bodies, is a clear manifestation of sovereignty;” and that is precisely what Moscow is now asserting, Aksyonov points out.
“That is why,” he continues, “rather than idly waiting for the tide to turn, we should launch a geographical offensive of our own by staking new claims on the country’s western, eastern, and southern extremities: the Caspian as the Russian Sea, Kaliningrad as Rusgorod, and the Kurils as the Russian Islands.”
Indeed, ‘for the sake of symmetry,” the Svobodnaya Pressa writer concludes, “we might even come up with something similar for the North,” Aksyonov says, renaming it “the Russian Ocean” — before someone else thinks of trying to make it their own first by a name and then by force.
About Paul Goble
Paul Goble is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia. Most recently, he was director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy. Earlier, he served as vice dean for the social sciences and humanities at Audentes University in Tallinn and a senior research associate at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia. He has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Goble maintains the Window on Eurasia blog and can be contacted directly at paul.goble@gmail.com .
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