Zelenskyy’s Backing of Iran Sanctions May Have Cost Iranian People’s Solidarity
Of the many countries of the Global South that maintain cordial ties with Russia, Iran happens to be one of the few outliers where the public doesn’t hold predominantly positive views of the Eurasian heavyweight. Anti-Russia sentiments have snowballed in Iran since the start of the Ukraine war, and as reflected in an October 2022 Cambridge University study, unfavorable perceptions of Russia are more widespread in Iran than in Bulgaria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, North Macedonia or Armenia.
The sympathy of a sizable portion of Iranian society with Ukraine as it fights a war that NATO leaders have described as a confrontation between the West and the rest, is a surprising finding given the government’s unchanged resolve to sustain a foreign policy built on opposition to the Western powers, especially the United States.
It might also be unexpected for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. As he seeks to diversify his lineup of benefactors, Zelenskyy has lost sight of a contingent of sympathizers in Iran sticking up for his country despite the two nations not having a lot in common culturally and historically. The spillover effects of the war are also unlikely to have reverberations in the daily lives of Iranians, rendering their sympathies even more authentic.
In the initial stages of Russia’s deadly campaign, voices from Iran’s intelligentsia condemning Vladimir Putin were common and posed a challenge to the state narrative that openly downplayed Russia’s atrocities. Yet the Islamic Republic emerged as a consistent provider of military support to Russia. From the beginning of the full-scale invasion through September 13 this year, Russia has fired 8,060 Iran-made Shahed drones at Ukraine.
Over time, Zelenskyy escalated his Iran-bashing rhetoric, culminating in remarks in October, when he called Iran, China and North Korea a “coalition of criminals.” To be sure, Zelenskyy’s skepticism of Iran had begun to surface after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) downed the Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 on January 8, 2020, killing 176 passengers and crew. The Islamic Republic made a bad situation worse by denying wrongdoing for three days and then refusing to investigate the case.
After Russia started the war, Zelenskyy was largely focused on strategizing national mobilization and an effective defense against the aggressor. As Tehran sought to ingratiate itself with Moscow, the Ukrainian leader upped the ante against Iran piecemeal. One of his first periodic Twitter (X) castigations of Iran was a message on Nov 6, 2022, when he wrote he had “discussed increasing sanctions & opposing actions of Iran, which supports aggression” in a meeting with the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen.
It is not surprising that he intensified his opprobrium of Iran to draw attention to the alliance of Tehran and Moscow, which has damaged his war effort. But the flip side has been that he fell out of favor with many Iranians who otherwise championed his cause.
Perceptions of Russia among Iranians have been deteriorating steadily. A 2022 survey by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation showed 50 percent of Iranian people had negative views toward Russia.
Zelenskyy has nurtured a public aversion to Iran, which can be beneficial domestically from a rally-round-the-flag point of view, but it is also alienating potential companions. When the Ukrainian powerlifter Ivan Chuprinko refused to shake hands with his Iranian opponent Amir Reza Mesforoosh during the International Powerlifting Federation world championship awards ceremony in Sun City, South Africa, last May, a large chorus of Iranians criticized what they said was his unsporting conduct. Several social media users accused Zelenskyy of being ignorant about the reality of Iran and agitating his people against the wrong enemy.
The Ukrainian president, who has crisscrossed countries far and wide to enlist support for his people, hasn’t shied away from appealing to undemocratic leaders who hadn’t shown any inclination to denounce Russia or aid Ukraine. In June of this year, he traveled to Jeddah to meet the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, despite the kingdom’s longstanding affinity with Russia, including their more recent coordination to stabilize the energy market with Iran’s output being excluded due to the sanctions.
Zelenskyy also phoned the United Arab Emirates (UAE) leadership several times, courting the Persian Gulf kingdom after it abstained from voting on a February 2022 Security Council resolution censuring Russia’s aggression. UAE had also refused to vote in favor of a UN General Assembly resolution suspending Russia’s membership in the UN Human Rights Council and another nonbinding resolution calling on Russia to pay war reparations to Ukraine.
But with Iran, where a spontaneous outpouring of pro-Ukraine solidarity had markedly distinguished the mood of the country from its neighbors, Zelenskyy has shut the door to diplomacy. His impatience with Tehran supplying weaponry to Moscow has foreclosed the possibility of engagement, even with a new president inaugurated in Tehran.
When the war broke out in Ukraine, Iranians found a new reason to be resentful of Putin’s sprawling empire.
In October 2022, in one of his early decisions to drive home his anger at the Islamic Republic, Zelenskyy expelled scores of Iranian students studying in Ukraine, revoking their government scholarships. There’s little clarity as to how many students were removed, but those who shared their stories with the media recounted being accosted and chastised by Ukraine’s immigration officers.
Targeting one of the most vulnerable demographics — students untethered from the politics of their government — was not the smartest idea for low-cost muscle-flexing. In doing so, Zelenskyy glossed over decades of economic and academic partnership between the two countries, one that bloomed whenever pro-reform administrations were in power in Iran.
Under the former President Hassan Rouhani, for example, several Iranian and Ukrainian universities had developed joint projects and student exchange programs. In one case, the Kharkiv National Medical University had signed cooperation agreements with five major Iranian universities.
During a trip to Ukraine by the other former reformist president of Iran, Mohammad Khatami, in October 2002 to meet his counterpart Leonid Kuchma, the two leaders signed an agreement on setting up an airplane construction consortium. The first Antonov-140 regional airliners were licensed to be manufactured at the HESA facility in the Iranian city of Isfahan in 1996, and the Islamic Republic was eyeing an even closer industrial collaboration.
There have been points in time when Ukraine’s trade surplus with Iran was even greater than its trade balance with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In 2016, shortly after the nuclear deal normalized international trade with Iran, it became one of Ukraine’s top 15 trading partners. However, Zelenskyy’s initiative in May 2023, enforcing economic sanctions that prohibited trade between the two countries for the next 50 years will compromise these links and likely fail to bring about any win-win outcome. In a span of 50 years, all sorts of fundamental political changes can occur in Iran, and it is not a stretch to describe the decision by Kiev, with all the sweeping impacts it can have, as a spur-of-the-moment reaction to the current downturn in bilateral relations.
Independent journalists have been among the most outspoken groups in Iran, facing government backlash for criticizing Russia.
To be sure, Russia’s full-scale invasion has made some existing political and security alliances more explicit and unfiltered than before. Russia’s traditional partners condoned its military expedition, rationalizing the war as either acceptable or inevitable. Nations that have traditionally been part of the Western political orbit sided with Ukraine, even if they previously lacked close ties with the Eastern European nation.
Under its now-deceased president Ebrahim Raisi, Iran didn’t hesitate to pledge allegiance to the aggressor. Raisi picked up the phone to call Putin hours after the invasion began, deploring NATO’s eastward expansion and committing support for Moscow. He said he hoped “what is happening ends up to benefit the nations and the region.”
As a neophyte politician, the hardline jurist was inordinately dependent on Putin to carve out a foothold on the world stage. As his administration actively antagonized Europe, Raisi was left with few options, and his outreach to Russia often seemed obedient as much as it was preordained. In his three years as president, Raisi never traveled to any European country, and didn’t receive any European leader in Tehran — other than Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus. And he oversaw day-to-day microaggressions in relations with the European Union, a case in point being the closure of the French cultural center in Tehran in 2023 after a skirmish with the government of Emmanuel Macron.
Upon Raisi’s first Moscow visit on January 19, 2022, for an audience with his Russian counterpart, the lukewarm reception at the Kremlin took even the hardliners in Tehran aback. What was described as a state visit wound up being a diplomatic faux pas: the guard of honor was missing; Putin didn’t even leave his room to greet the visiting dignitary, and eventually met him at his famous “long table.” Lastly, there was even no trace of the two nations’ flags in an event that ended without a press conference.
The Islamic Republic understood that it was too vulnerable to dispute the absence of these optional niceties. On a different note, even after Russia threw its weight behind the United Arab Emirates on two occasions in 2023, signing statements that questioned Iran’s sovereignty of three islands in the Persian Gulf claimed by UAE, there wasn’t much that the Islamic Republic could do. It was a fait accompli — being let down by a power that was supposed to be an ally.
The broader public, however, has been skeptical of embracing Russia, even for a lack of alternatives. Owing to a blend of historical grievances and new fault lines, perceptions of Russia among Iranians have been deteriorating steadily. A 2022 survey by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation showed 50 percent of Iranian people had negative views toward Russia. Only 15 percent said they viewed Russia’s influence favorably.
Solidarity with Ukraine has also been expressed by the nation’s religious-minded communities.
One catalyst of the lingering bitterness is Russia’s imperial footprint during the 19th century, when it annexed large swaths of Iran’s territory through a trio of peace treaties, all of which Iranians recollect as episodes of indelible national humiliation. Many understand the Russian Empire as having been an opportunistic neighbor.
Today, Iranians also begrudge Russia’s endorsement of punitive UN Security Council resolutions between 2006 and 2010, which opened the floodgates to an avalanche of economic sanctions on the country. The Security Council members’ consensus to treat Iran’s nuclear program under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which addresses threats to global peace and acts of aggression, communicated the urgency of countering Iran to all member states.
Russia didn’t use its veto power then to shield a putatively strategic ally, and what was marketed as a special relationship remained Iran’s unrequited love. Still, at the height of the Islamic Republic’s tensions with the United States and Europe, the ruling elite in Tehran insisted that the Kremlin was a robust security anchor.
When the war broke out in Ukraine, Iranians found a new reason to be resentful of Putin’s sprawling empire. Having endured eight years of occupation by the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, they recognized what it meant to be caught in the crosshairs of a foreign adversary’s wrath and bear witness to the unchecked loss of life and decimation of one’s country’s infrastructure.
The Islamic Republic’s position from the onset was to soft-pedal the war on Ukraine and implant Moscow’s framing of the invasion as a “special military operation” in the local media coverage. Yet, Russia’s expansionist project struck a chord only with an enclave of hidebound government patrons.
Independent journalists have been among the most outspoken groups in Iran, facing government backlash for criticizing Russia and covering the unfolding crisis without abandoning their ethical standards. The nation’s most hardline newspaper, Kayhan, run by a representative of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, routinely pillories the Iranian supporters of Ukraine, including newspapers denouncing Russia, as traitors besotted by the West.
Iranians aren’t a monolith and the government’s unilateral outreach to Putin is an unpopular position domestically.
But solidarity with Ukraine has also been expressed by the nation’s religious-minded communities. Ahead of the fasting month of Ramadan in 2022, a religious congregation in Tehran caught the worshippers and observers off-guard by erecting flags of Yemen and Ukraine together as part of its setting design, predicated on the belief that Shia Islam is supposed to aid and honor the oppressed.
Around the same time, in an interview with Asia Newspaper, Ukraine’s then-ambassador in Iran Sergey Burdylyak, said his observations in Tehran reflected strong support for Ukraine as it defended itself against Russia. He said he was heartened to see people waving the Ukrainian flag everywhere.
On February 26, 2022, a group of Tehran residents gathered in front of the Ukrainian embassy, carrying the flag of Ukraine and vigil candles. Security forces didn’t take long to disperse them forcibly, but the protesters still chanted “Death to Putin,” calling the Russian embassy a “den of espionage.”
Against this backdrop, as President Zelenskyy ups the war of words with Tehran, Iranians are also asking questions they previously hadn’t reckoned with: Has Ukraine ever called for the removal of the economic sanctions inflicting despair on Iranians’ lives? Has Zelenskyy voiced support for the pro-democracy, women’s rights movement in Iran that has inspired millions worldwide? Has he called for the release of Iranians who, like him, have been fighting for the liberty of their people, such as the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Narges Mohammadi, who is now behind bars in the Iranian capital?
Tehran’s continued provision of armaments to Russia is not only objectionable — it marks the hypocrisy of a government that had for years boasted of its opposition to militarism and oppression. Iranian drones and ballistic missiles have fueled a war machine that has subdued the Ukrainian people and upended their lives. The magnitude of damage wrought by these weapons has been documented in detail.
But with the understanding that Iranians aren’t a monolith and that the government’s unilateral outreach to Putin is an unpopular position domestically, couldn’t Ukraine’s president chart a different path that would bolster his defense against Russia while giving him the chance to play the long game on ties with Iran?
It wouldn’t have been costly for Zelenskyy to talk to Iran’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian in the same vein he engaged the leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Since the day he came to power, Pezeshkian made it clear that he was in favor of peace, that he wished to restore normalcy in Iran’s foreign relations, and that he wanted to turn the tide domestically and contain religious extremism. In Pezeshkian, Zelenskyy could find a partner for understanding.
The Ukrainian president’s anti-war platform could also benefit from keeping the Iranian people onboard. They seem to be losing interest as he has.