Russias

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has arrived in Beijing as the United States blocks the Strait of Hormuz, through which China imports about a third of its oil supplies.

Lavrov received a red-carpet welcome on Tuesday, according to photos shared by Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Beijing and Moscow have condemned the US and Israel over their war on Iran, with China also being economically affected by the energy crisis it has caused.

China, a big importer of Iranian oil, also slammed a recently imposed US scheme to blockade vessels entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas, including in the Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

“The Strait of Hormuz is an important international trade route for goods and energy, and maintaining its security, stability, and unimpeded flow is in the common interest of the international community,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Guo Jiakun said on Monday.

Lavrov speaks to Araghchi

Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher, reporting from Washington, DC, said the US’s goal is to choke Iran off by blocking everything coming in and out of Iranian ports.

“What the US hopes is that there’ll be pressure on Iran from some of its main business partners, including China,” he said, adding that Beijing imports about a third of its oil from Iran. “The United States is hoping that pressure on China will mean China putting pressure on Iran and forcing Iran to get back to the negotiating table.”

On Monday, Lavrov held a telephone conversation with his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi.

The top Russian diplomat told  Araghchi it was important to guard against any resumption of hostilities in the Middle East, and said Russia stood ready to help with a settlement, according to a statement by the Russian Foreign Ministry.

“S Lavrov emphasised the importance of preventing a recurrence of armed confrontation and once again confirmed Russia’s unwavering readiness to assist in resolving the crisis, which has no military solution,” the ministry said.

It added Araghchi related to Lavrov details of US-Iran talks in Pakistan at the weekend, which failed to reach a breakthrough.

Beijing and Moscow are close economic and political partners, and the relationship has deepened further since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Wang also held a call with Lavrov on April 5, when they agreed that Beijing and Moscow would work together to de-escalate tensions in the Middle East.

Diplomacy traffic in Beijing

China welcomed a string of leaders of countries that have been affected by the war and its economic fallout this week, including Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and United Arab Emirates President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, also known as MBZ.

Chinese President Xi Jinping met MBZ and Sanchez on Tuesday morning, and Vietnamese President To Lam is expected in China for a four-day trip.

“I think what this really speaks to is that many people around the world have been surprised that China has not played a more active role in the Iran war, given it has such strong ties with Tehran, including as Iran’s largest trading partner and buyer of crude oil,” Al Jazeera’s Katrina Yu, reporting from Beijing, said.

“But what China has been doing, besides calling for restraint and more negotiation, is taking advantage of this moment to really look at states that may be a little disenchanted with the US or looking to diversify from reliance on Washington,” Yu said.

“China has presented itself as the opposite of Washington – a reliable, stable and predictable partner. For many states, that message really appeals.”

Trump’s threats after ‘fabricated’ reports

Trump, who is scheduled to visit Beijing next month for talks with Xi, said on Sunday he would hit China’s goods with a 50 percent tariff if it provided military assistance to Tehran.

His comments came the same day CNN reported that US intelligence indicated China was preparing to deliver new air defence systems to Iran within the next few weeks, quoting three people familiar with the assessments.

On Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo said those reports were “completely fabricated”.

“If the US insists on using this as an excuse to impose additional tariffs on China, China will definitely take resolute countermeasures,” he said.

Russia’s intelligence agency accuses the second secretary at the British Embassy in Moscow of espionage.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has ordered a British diplomat to leave the country within two weeks over allegations of economic espionage, which the United Kingdom rejected as “unacceptable” amid tensions over Russia’s war on Ukraine.

The FSB, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, on Monday said its counterintelligence officers had expelled Albertus Gerhardus Janse van Rensburg, the second secretary at the British Embassy in Moscow.

“The FSB ⁠uncovered signs that the diplomat was carrying out intelligence and subversive activities that threaten the security of the Russian Federation,” the agency said.

It added that the diplomat had attempted to “obtain sensitive information during informal meetings with Russian experts in the field of economics”.

“In order to avoid negative ⁠consequences, including criminal liability, the FSB of Russia recommends that compatriots refrain from holding meetings ⁠with British diplomats,” it said.

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it had delivered a protest to Britain’s charge d’affaires over the alleged spy.

The British ⁠Foreign Office responded by saying that Russia’s accusations against ⁠its diplomats were “completely unacceptable” and that it would ⁠not tolerate “intimidation” of ⁠its ⁠embassy staff or their families.

Russia-UK discord

Russia has claimed British intelligence launched espionage activities at a level unseen since the depths of the Cold War to sow discord within the country, and it has long complained that its own diplomats are routinely harassed in key Western capitals.

The UK, ‌which supports Ukraine with money and weapons, sees Russia as its biggest immediate threat and accuses its intelligence of mounting cyberattacks, killings and sabotage campaigns across the Western world.

Since Russia launched its full-scale military invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russian authorities have sought to suppress opposition to the war while aiming to rally support for the war among Russian citizens.

Last week, Russia declared the teacher and main protagonist of the Oscar-winning documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin a “foreign agent“. Pavel Talankin spent two years documenting pro-war propaganda at a school in the Chelyabinsk region in west-central Russia while working as the school’s videographer.

“A bit” is what United States President Donald Trump thinks about the scale of Russia’s military aid to Iran.

Moscow “might be helping them a bit”, he told Fox News on March 13.

A day later, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated laconically that Moscow’s military cooperation with Tehran was “good”.

His words seemed to confirm earlier media reports that Russia is providing Iran with satellite and intelligence data on the locations of US warships and aircraft.

It may not sound like much, given the superiority of Western military satellites and Russia’s battlefield losses and communication problems after Elon Musk’s SpaceX company switched off smuggled Starlink satellite Internet terminals.

But data on US military assets Iran is receiving most likely comes from Liana, Moscow’s only fully functional system of spy satellites, according to an expert on Russia’s space programme and military.

“The [Liana] system has been created to spy on US carrier strike groups and other navy forces and for identifying them as targets,” Pavel Luzin, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a US think tank, told Al Jazeera.

Eyes in the sky

Russia also played a key role in the development of Iran’s space programme and its key satellite, the Khayyam.

Launched in 2022 from Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome, the 650kg (1,430 pound) satellite orbits the Earth at 500 kilometres (310 miles) and has a resolution of one metre (3.3 feet).

Moscow “can, in theory, receive and process data from Iran’s optical imaging satellite and share data from its own several satellites”, Luzin said.

On Wednesday, Tehran claimed to have struck the Abraham Lincoln carrier with multiple cruise and ballistic missiles, but the Pentagon called the claim “pure fiction”.

On Sunday, Iranian media claimed that a “massive blaze” was caused by a strike on a US destroyer refuelling in the Indian Ocean.

Washington did not comment on that strike.

Russia has, for decades, supplied weaponry to Iran, including advanced air defence systems, trainer and fighter jets, helicopters, armoured vehicles and sniper rifles, worth billions of dollars.

Since Washington and Tel Aviv began their strikes on February 28, Russia has continued aiding Iran with “intelligence, data, experts and components” for weaponry, Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of Ukraine’s general staff of armed forces, told Al Jazeera.

While Moscow and Tehran loudly proclaim their strategic partnership, they do not have a mutual defence clause, and Moscow has not intervened in the conflict directly.

But the arms supplies have been mutual. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Tehran has provided Moscow with ammunition and artillery shells, firearms and short-range ballistic missiles, helmets and flak jackets.

Drones with ‘comets’

And then there are the Shahed kamikaze drones – slow, noisy, yet cheap to manufacture – which have been launched on Ukrainian cities in swarms of dozens and then hundreds. Ukraine became so adept at bringing these down – now mass-producing cheap interceptor systems specifically to target Shaheds – that it is now providing its own know-how to Gulf states where US military assets have come under fire from Iran in recent weeks.

In the course of its war with Ukraine, Moscow has manufactured and modernised Shaheds, making them faster and deadlier, and equipping them with cameras, navigators and, occasionally, artificial intelligence modules.

And now, some of the upgrades have made their way back to Iran.

A Shahed drone with a pivotal Russian component launched by Iran-backed Hezbollah from southern Lebanon was able to hit a British airbase on Cyprus on March 1, the UK’s Times newspaper reported on March 7.

It reportedly contained Kometa-B (Comet B), a Russian-made satellite navigation module that also acts as an anti-jamming shield, making drones more resistant to interference.

Russia has also perfected the tactic of sending waves of real and decoy drones to exhaust and overwhelm Western-supplied air defence systems in Ukraine.

These days, the scheme helps Iran hit targets in the Gulf, Western officials say.

“I think no one will be surprised to believe that Putin’s hidden hand is behind some of the Iranian tactics and potentially some of their capabilities as well,” British Defence Secretary John Healey said on March 12 after Iranian drones struck a base used by Western forces in Erbil, northern Iraq.

However, if Iran is suffering a shortage of drones – as some analysts believe it is – that would render the use of Russian tactics, as well as Russia-supplied satellite data useless, experts say.

“Russia does supply data, it’s obvious, the data helps Iran, but not much,” Nikita Smagin, a Russian expert who has written extensively on ties between Moscow and Tehran, told Al Jazeera.

After four days of intensive strikes using up to 250 drones a day in early March, Iran has been launching only up to 50 drones a day, according to Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University.

“Iran ran out of steam really fast,” he told Al Jazeera.

‘A goodwill gesture’

Moreover, Moscow is not necessarily particularly interested in an Iranian military victory, as the war is benefitting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s own conflict in Ukraine.

Skyrocketing oil prices make “Putin financially capable of further hostilities,” Lieutenant General Romanenko said.

As Iran strangles shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the price of Brent crude – the international benchmark – has soared past $100 a barrel in the past three weeks. US President Donald Trump was forced to temporarily suspend sanctions on shipped Russian oil to ease the economic backlash. The result has been tankers laden with Russian oil bound for China making U-turns in the open ocean to divert to India, as countries scramble to grab Russian oil cargoes out at sea. The price of Urals crude has bounced.

Putin “hasn’t achieved his goals in Ukraine and will therefore use anything, including the war [in Iran] and lies to achieve his vision, press with his ultimatums,” Romanenko said.

The Kremlin “doesn’t pursue a breakthrough in this war, doesn’t help Iran break the United States and Israel,” Ruslan Suleymanov, an associate fellow at the New Eurasian Strategies Center, a US-British think tank, told Al Jazeera.

The current intelligence and military aid is “more of a goodwill gesture, an attempt to create an illusion of help, to show Tehran that despite the lack of formal commitments, Russia doesn’t leave its friend in need”, he said.

And Tehran fully understands how insufficient Moscow’s aid is – and therefore relies on its own stratagem of expanding hostilities to the entire region through strikes on neighbouring states and of crippling the global economy with soaring oil prices.

“Iranians understand that the forces are not equal and it’s impossible to defeat the United States and Israel on the battlefield, and no Russian aid is going to help,” he said.

It seems that Trump’s assessment that Moscow “might be helping them a bit” may not be too far wide of the mark.