Kremlin Propagandists Shocked by Operations Over Iran

The US and Israeli attacks on Iran – a key ally of Russia that for years helped Moscow circumvent sanctions and supplied Russia with deadly Shahed drones along with full turnkey production technology – came as a big surprise to the Kremlin.

There are three main narratives among Russian propagandist channels and speakers:

• Russia didn’t help its allies
• Trump betrayed Russia
• Russia will be the next

Putin’s strange statements of “condolences” over the death of Ayatollah Khamenei, without accusing the very forces that eliminated him, were mocked not only in the comments on the page of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

“You’re next,” Americans, Britons, and Ukrainians wrote.

A popular Ukrainian blogger, former adviser to the head of the Presidential Office and Kyiv’s chief military spokesperson, Oleksiy Arestovych, remarked that the Israeli-US attack on Iran exposed the colossal weakness of Russia, China, and BRICS as a whole.

Recently, Kremlin propagandists had tried to use BRICS and the Global South to frighten the entire world order.

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“A rare case in world diplomacy – the Russian Federation and the PRC condemned the killing of the ‘Supreme Leader of Iran’ without naming the killer – Donald Trump,” Arestovych noted.

“He remains for them, as before, a ‘respected partner.’ At the first real test, the Global South turned out not to be a united front, but a club of the insecure, where everyone turns away from one another at the first sign of danger.”

Russian propagandists, almost for the first time, agree with Ukrainians in their assessments.

They are shocked by the attack of yesterday’s “friend and partner,” Donald Trump, on Iran, which was one of the main weapons suppliers to the Russian Federation.

According to many analysts, Russia maintained very close relations with the Iranian ayatollah regime for an additional reason: Sanctions against the regime of the Islamic Revolution kept oil prices high, because Iran, one of the largest oil producers, was de facto cut off from the market.

The fall of the regime, and thus the lifting of sanctions, could mean Iranian oil entering the market triggering a drop in prices for “black gold,” which would be highly deleterious for Moscow.

For Russia, Iran was a valuable ally. Tehran invested heavily in the Kremlin, helping it bypass sanctions by delivering large batches of Shahed UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). Soon thereafter, the Iranians helped localize their production in Russia in the thousands per month, and provided military specialists to train Kremlin Shahed handlers in using these new so-called kamikaze drones.

Thus, the aerial attacks on Iran were perceived very painfully in Russia.

“It was the year 2026, and the orange pedophile senile man continues to search for candidates for the role of heads of sovereign countries, first killing their legitimate leaders and calling it a ‘beautiful deal!’” wrote the popular propaganda Telegram channel with a million subscribers, Notes of a Veteran.

The channel called those whom it only yesterday referred to as “respected partners” – Donald Trump and Marco Rubio – pedophiles and “orange degenerates.”

“The pedophiles couldn’t even coordinate their statements with each other! Rubio claims that the US did not plan to strike the Iranian leader, and immediately the red-haired degenerate comes out and declares that the US planned to destroy the entire top leadership of Iran within 2–3 weeks,” the channel wrote.

Enraged by the unexpected attack on Iran, propagandists are using their favorite tactic – appeals to morality, international law, and sovereignty. The very things their country has systematically violated since February 2014, in the first days of the war against Ukraine.

“President Putin described Khamenei’s death as a cynical murder in violation of all norms of human morality and international law… … Just some kind of lawlessness!” wrote one of Russia’s main television presenters, Olga Skabeyeva.

Another problem is disappointment in Trump, whom many Russian propagandists considered purely pro-Russian. The popular Russian writer, blogger, and war criminal Zakhar Prilepin openly scolded those who believed, after Alaska, in “American-Russian friendship.”

“All those who for a whole year praised Trump, shed crocodile tears over Charlie Kirk, sang songs about unbreakable American-Russian friendship, all those who said Zelensky had only days left, and that unlike the Ukrainians the Americans speak to us as equals – have you completely lost your capacity for critical thinking?” Prilepin sneered.

Separately, Prilepin complained that Russia is not supporting Iran now – just as several months ago it did not support Venezuela. And that Cuba may be next.

“We failed to protect Venezuela! The entire Russian blogosphere unanimously called Maduro a corrupt official and a bandit. He was sold out and forgotten, just like this friendly Latin American country! Cuba also has no chance of survival; Russia is silent again!” wrote Zakhar Prilepin.

Prilepin drew a grim conclusion for Russian propagandists – “those who carefully look at the world map understand – Russia is next.”

And he is not alone in his forecasts. One of the ideologists of Putin’s regime, the right-wing populist philosopher Alexander Dugin, directly said that Russia could become Trump’s next target.

“Trump negotiated with Maduro about a compromise, and Maduro was ready to compromise. The purpose of the negotiations was clear – to buy time to prepare for an operation. Then Trump negotiated with Iran. And Iran was ready to compromise, while the real goal was to buy time to prepare for an attack. Now Trump is negotiating with Russia, trying to draw it into a compromise that it supposedly is ready for,” wrote Dugin.

From this Dugin drew one conclusion – the war with Ukraine must continue without pause or stop. And then somehow things will work out.

Otherwise, he concluded, the same thing that happened to Khamenei could happen to Putin. This statement was picked up by many media outlets, both Ukrainian and Russian.

“Do we have a plan and resources in case this happens to us? The last bell has rung for Russia,” Dugin wrote.

The somber mood was also set by the Kremlin’s chief propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov. In his propaganda speech on central television, he lamented that: “There are no rules left in the world, and it is entering a period of great wars.” Notably, without seeing any irony, Solovyov did not connect this with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine without cause or declaration of war.