Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Russia reportedly provided targeting information to Iran to attack American forces in the Middle East, the first indication that another major US adversary is taking part – indirectly – in the war, according to three US officials familiar with the intelligence.
Citing a report by The Washington Post, the assistance, which has never been reported before, signals that this rapidly developing conflict now involves one of America’s main nuclear-armed enemies with extraordinary intelligence capabilities.
Since the war began on Saturday, Russia has provided Iran with the locations of US military assets, including warships and aircraft, said the three officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, declined to comment on the intelligence findings. Moscow has called for an end to the war, which it calls an “unprovoked act of armed aggression.”
How much Russia will help Iran is not entirely clear. Iran’s own military ability to track US troops has declined less than a week after the fighting began, officials said.
The CIA and Pentagon also declined to comment.
When asked this week about his message to Russia and China, which are among Iran’s strongest backers, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he had no message and that “they’re not really a factor here.”
Two officials familiar with Russia’s support for Iran said that China did not appear to be helping Iran’s defense, despite close ties between the two countries.
In a statement, the Chinese Embassy in Washington referred to Beijing’s diplomatic efforts to engage with partners in the region since the war began and said the conflict should be “immediately stopped.”
Analysts said the intelligence exchange would fit the pattern of Iranian attacks on US forces, including command and control infrastructure, radars and temporary structures, such as the one in Kuwait where six service members were killed.
The CIA station at the US Embassy in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, was also attacked and destroyed in recent days. Parts of the embassy building have become “irrecoverable” and must be closed, according to an internal State Department assessment.
Iran “carried out very targeted attacks on early warning radars or over-the-horizon radars,” said Dara Massicot, a Russian military expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They’re doing this in a very targeted way. They’re aiming for command and control,” he added.
Iran has only a few military-grade satellites, and no satellite constellation of its own, which would make the imagery provided by Russia’s far more advanced space capabilities invaluable — especially as the Kremlin has sharpened its own targeting after years of war in Ukraine, Massicot said.
Nicole Grajewski, who studies Iran’s cooperation with Russia at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, said there was a high level of “sophistication” in Iran’s counterattacks, both in terms of the targets Tehran aimed at and its ability in some cases to defeat U.S. and allied defenses.
“They managed to penetrate the air defenses,” he said, noting that the quality of Iran’s attacks appeared to have improved even compared with the 12-day war with Israel last summer.
Russian assistance has changed the way countries have engaged in proxy wars since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Throughout the conflict, US adversaries including Iran, China and North Korea have provided Russia with direct military aid or material support for Moscow’s vast defense industry. The United States has provided Ukraine with military equipment worth tens of billions of dollars and shared intelligence on Russian positions to increase targeting of Kyiv.
On Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted on X that the Trump administration had requested assistance to help protect against Iranian drones and that Kyiv would provide “specialists” in response.
Iran has been one of Russia’s main backers during the Ukraine war, sharing technology to produce cheap one-way attack drones that have been repeatedly used to overwhelm Kyiv’s air defenses and deplete supplies of Western interceptors donated to protect Ukrainian cities.
“Russia is well aware of the assistance we are providing Ukraine,” said one US official familiar with Moscow’s support for Tehran. “I think they really enjoy trying to give back.”
The quality of Russia’s intelligence gathering is not on par with America’s, but it is still among the best in the world, this person continued.
The Kremlin itself sees possible advantages in a prolonged war between the US and Iran, including higher oil revenues and an acute crisis that diverts American and European attention from the war in Ukraine.
Iran, whose supreme leader was killed early in the conflict, could become the latest country to lose a pro-Russian government in recent years, following the Syrian uprising in late 2024 that toppled dictator Bashar al-Assad and the US military offensive to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January.
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