Transcription
A former president of Russia is standing in Tehran right now, bowing his head over the coffin of a man who ran Iran for 37 years and was killed by an American and Israeli air strike. At the very same hour, a Russian warship is shouldering a German Coast Guard vessel out of the way in the Baltic Sea. And a few hundred kilometers north of both of those stories, Moscow is telling the world once again that if anyone touches Belarus, they touch Russia. Three fronts, one week. And if you think these are three separate stories, I want to convince you in the next few minutes that they are actually one story told in three parts about how Vladimir Putin is trying to prove something to the entire planet at the exact moment his hand looks weakest.
Let's start in Tehran because that is where the cameras are. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on February 28th when the war between Israel, the United States, and Iran was only days old. He was 86 years old and he had led the Islamic Republic since 1989, inheriting the role from Ayatollah Khomeini himself and spending nearly four decades turning the office of supreme leader into the single most powerful position in the country: above the president, above parliament, above the judiciary. For most of the world, Khamenei was simply a fixture, a face that had been issuing the same defiant speeches against the United States and Israel for so long that people stopped expecting anything to actually change. And then in the span of a single air strike, it did.
The funeral itself has been long delayed. And when it finally began, it began as a statement. Iranian officials floated numbers as high as 15 to 20 million mourners across the ceremonies, which would make this the largest funeral procession in the country's history, larger even than the 1989 farewell for Ayatollah Khomeini that drew roughly 10 million people. The coffin lay in state at Tehran's Grand Mosalla, the same vast prayer complex where Khomeini delivered his major speeches for decades, surrounded by the smaller coffins of the family members killed alongside him. Processions were planned to move through Qom, through Najaf and Karbala in Iraq before Khamenei is finally buried in his home city of Mashhad beside one of Shia Islam's holiest shrines. Tehran effectively shut down, offices closed, airspace closed, streets closed to private cars. State television showed footage of mourners swaying and beating their chests as the coffin was carried through crowds, flowers thrown from the buyer, a lament sung over loudspeakers. And Iran's military command used a moment to send a message outward, warning the United States and Israel that any miscalculation during funeral week would trigger what they called a harsh and regrettable response.
There's a detail buried in all of this that I think matters more than it first appears. Ahmad Vahidi, the top commander of Iran's Khatam al-Anbiya Joint Military Command, resurfaced in public for the first time since early February, meaning he had been essentially invisible for the entire duration of the war. He appeared beside Khamenei's coffin, paid his respects on camera, and gave a defiant statement to state television about the martyr leader's blood, marking a turning point for the Islamic Republic. According to reporting on the inner workings of Tehran's current leadership, Vahidi is believed to now be playing a significant role in shaping Iran's position in ongoing talks with the United States and is considered part of the tight circle surrounding the wounded and hidden Supreme Leader. In other words, the actual center of gravity inside the Iranian state right now may not be the funeral procession you're watching on television. It may be a small group of military and clerical youth figures making decisions from somewhere the cameras can't reach. While the public spectacle of mass mourning runs in parallel as a display of continuity, the government desperately needs the population and the world to believe it.
Now watch who showed up to the funeral because the guest list tells you almost everything about where the world's alliances actually sit today. Western governments were conspicuously absent. No American officials, no major European heads of state, but roughly 30 countries sent delegations and the mix is genuinely revealing. Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif came in person, a man who has positioned himself as a mediator between Washington and Tehran throughout the war. China sent He Wei, a vice chairperson of its National People's Congress, senior enough to signal respect, not senior enough to signal a shift in China's broader posture of staying out of direct entanglement in the Middle East. India sent its deputy foreign minister along with the governor of Bihar, a former army lieutenant general who happens to be the most senior Shia Muslim currently holding public office in India, a deliberate choice meant to speak to India's own large Shia population as much as to Tehran. The Taliban's foreign minister flew in from Kabul alongside the Taliban's first deputy prime minister for economic affairs. An uncomfortable pairing since Afghan opposition figures and even members of the anti-Taliban resistance were reportedly present at the same ceremonies, prompting accusations from Taliban supporters online that Iran was playing both sides. Delegations arrived from Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, even Cuba and Serbia. And Russia sent Dmitry Medvedev, not Putin himself. Medvedev, former president, former prime minister, now deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, and these days probably best known for firing off apocalyptic warnings on social media faster than almost anyone else in the Kremlin's orbit. He arrived as Putin's special envoy, leading a delegation that included Russian foreign ministry officials alongside religious leaders from the Russian Orthodox Church and Sunni and Shia theologians. A carefully built interfaith visual designed for cameras as much as for diplomacy. He posted his condolences publicly, calling Khamenei's death a martyrdom and telling Iranians that Russia mourns this immeasurable loss alongside them and attached video of his meetings with Iranian officials to the post, making sure the moment did double duty as both condolence and diplomacy on camera.
There's a small, almost overlooked detail that actually says a great deal about how seriously Russia is treating its own presence in the region right now. Russia's Civil Aviation Authority has indefinitely suspended commercial flights to and from Iran, citing regional military tensions, which means the delegation carrying Russia's own former president into Tehran had to travel under conditions Russia itself considers too dangerous for ordinary commercial air traffic. That is not the backdrop of a confident, stable alliance. That is the backdrop of two governments performing solidarity in the middle of what both of them privately treat as an active war zone.
Here's what I want you to notice about the choice to send Medvedev instead of Putin. It cuts two ways. On one hand, it signals that Russia takes this seriously enough to send one of its most senior and most recognizable political figures, a man who has personally met with Iranian leadership and who Putin trusts to carry his voice. On the other hand, it is not Putin. Compare that to the leaders Pakistan or Afghanistan sent: actual heads of government, actual foreign ministers. Putin himself stayed home, which tells you Russia wants to be seen standing with Tehran without fully entangling itself in what happens next. Because what happens next in Iran is generally unpredictable. A wounded, hidden new supreme leader. A military commander resurfacing after months underground, reportedly now shaping the country's negotiating posture from the shadows. A government trying to project strength through the sheer scale of a funeral while its actual chain of command looks shakier than at any point in decades.
Russia's calculation here is simple. Even if the situation around it is not. Iran and Russia signed a strategic partnership agreement back in 2025. But notice what that agreement deliberately does not include. It stops short of a mutual defense obligation, unlike the treaty Russia has with North Korea, which does commit each side to come to the other's aid if attacked. Moscow gets to call Iran a close partner. Gets to publicly condemn the American and Israeli strikes as what it labels an unprovoked act of aggression. Gets to send its former president to stand beside the coffin, all without committing Russian soldiers or Russian air defenses to Iran's survival. Medvedev has previously floated the idea that unnamed countries might be willing to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads. A comment that reads less like a serious policy proposal and more like the kind of rhetorical grenade he's become known for tossing into the conversation to unsettle western capitals without Russia itself having to actually do anything. It is solidarity with an asterisk: symbolic weight, minimal cost, maximum flexibility. And if you're wondering whether that pattern of loud rhetoric paired with careful limits sounds familiar, hold that thought, because we're about to see the exact same pattern play out 800 km from Moscow in a much colder body of water.
While Medvedev was in Tehran, a much smaller and frankly much stranger confrontation was unfolding in the Baltic Sea. A tanker called the Kira K, flying a Panamanian flag, sanctioned by the European Union, the UK, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ukraine, was hauling roughly 100,000 tons of Russian crude oil out of the port of Primorsk. This is part of what's become known as Russia's shadow fleet: aging tankers with murky ownership, sometimes switching off their automatic identification systems so nobody can track their location, used specifically to move Russian oil around Western sanctions. According to Ukrainian defense intelligence, sometimes used for ship-to-ship transfers designed to further obscure where the oil actually originated. Ukraine went so far as to sanction the Kira K's own ship captain personally back in February. As the Kira K approached the Fehmarn Belt, one of the narrow straits that connects the Baltic to the open sea near Denmark and Germany, a German coast guard vessel called the Baygan closing in to inspect it. Then a Russian Steregushchiy-class corvette, the Sovetsky, tail number 531, came racing in from the east at high speed. Its crew radioed a blunt warning to the Germans, identifying themselves and ordering the Coast Guard ship to stay clear of the tanker. The German vessel backed off. The tanker sailed on toward the Danish straits like nothing happened. And this wasn't even the only confrontation involving that tanker that week. On the same voyage, activists from Greenpeace traveling with members of the German Bundestag, the European Parliament, and journalists from multiple countries approached an inflatable boat trying to document the tanker's passage through what is technically Germany's exclusive economic zone. And the Russian corvette pushed them back too, radioing the same kind of warning it had given the Coast Guard. Greenpeace's own account of the incident notes that despite receiving the warning, the activists managed to complete their documentation of both the tanker and the warship, which tells you this wasn't purely about physically preventing observation. It was about establishing on the record who gets to give orders in that stretch of water.
Greenpeace has been tracking this pattern for months now, and their numbers are worth sitting with. Between March and June of this year alone, they recorded 42 out of 136 shadow fleet tankers passing near the German island of Rügen, with 31 of those vessels actually entering German territorial waters. A year earlier, they say that traffic simply wasn't there. And Estonian authorities reported earlier this year what they described as the first known case of a Russian civilian tanker carrying a mounted heavy machine gun while passing through the Gulf of Finland. A civilian ship, armed, moving through Baltic waters that are supposed to be governed by ordinary maritime law rather than military escort. So this isn't an isolated incident. This is a Russian Navy that has apparently decided its job now includes personally escorting sanctioned oil shipments through European waters and daring anyone—a coast guard, environmental activists, sitting national and European lawmakers—to get in the way.
The Kremlin's response when this kind of confrontation gets attention isn't to deny it, it's to reframe it. When reports surfaced earlier this year that a Russian anti-submarine warfare ship, the Severomorsk, a major vessel from Russia's Northern Fleet, had been spotted cruising near the German coastline close to the island of Fehmarn and LĂĽbeck Bay, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn't back away from it. He insisted Russian naval forces operate in strict compliance with international maritime law and he flipped the entire narrative, arguing that it's NATO's expanding military presence near Russia's borders that's actually the primary source of instability in the region, not Russian ships sailing through international straits that connect the Baltic to the North Sea. That's the Kremlin's standard move. And it's worth naming clearly because you'll see it repeat itself in every one of these three stories: Confront first, then claim you're the one being provoked, then let the confusion about who started it do the diplomatic work for you.
And here's the strategic logic underneath the theater, because none of this is happening for its own sake. Russia depends on the shadow fleet enormously. Oil revenue is one of the last major levers keeping the Russian economy functioning under sanctions that have now been in place in one form or another for years. And every barrel that makes it through the Baltic without being stopped, inspected, or seized is money Moscow badly needs to keep funding the war in Ukraine and everything downstream of it. So a warship escorting a tanker isn't just muscle flexing for its own sake. It's economic self-preservation wearing a military uniform. But it is also unmistakably a test. Germany has been ramping up its own defense posture and its support for Ukraine, including reportedly increasing borrowing to fund defense spending into the tens of billions of euros for the coming year. And every time a German vessel backs off from a Russian warning, Moscow gets a small, repeatable data point: How far can we push before someone actually pushes back? Do it enough times without consequence, and you've quietly established a new baseline for what Russian ships can get away with in NATO's own backyard without ever firing a shot or triggering an actual crisis.
Which brings us to the third front, the one where Russia's rhetoric has gotten the most extreme and arguably the most revealing: Belarus. For years now, Alexander Lukashenko has performed a very specific balancing act. He let Russian troops launch their 2022 invasion of Ukraine from Belarusian soil, opening his country's northern border to four combined arms armies and thousands of tanks and armored vehicles, and allowing Russian aircraft to fly hundreds of sorties a day from Belarusian airfields in that war's opening week. He has called Ukraine's defeat inevitable, questioned why Russian forces didn't finish taking Kyiv in the war's opening days, suggesting remarkably that Putin deliberately pulled troops back to try to restore peace rather than admitting any kind of military failure, and repeatedly framed Belarus and Russia as building what he calls a "single unified powerful state." And yet, at the same time, he has consistently tried to keep actual Belarusian troops out of the shooting war itself, insisting Belarus is a peaceful state that only wants the fighting to end. A tightrope he has now been walking for more than four years.
That balancing act has gotten dramatically harder this year. Ukraine's President Zelensky has accused Russia of using signal relay stations inside Belarusian territory to help guide missiles toward Ukrainian targets. And he has openly discussed identifying up to 500 potential strike targets inside Belarus, including what Lukashenko has described as "one very serious target." He declined to name that Ukraine says it is prepared to hit if Minsk gets pulled deeper into the war. Zelensky gave Lukashenko something close to an ultimatum on the relay stations, specifically saying publicly that a week should be enough time to switch them off and warning that if it wasn't done, Ukraine would do it itself. Lukashenko's own rhetoric has swung wildly in response to that pressure. At one point, in comments to Russian state media, he warned his western neighbors—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and by extension Ukraine—against any aggression toward Belarus, insisting Belarus doesn't want war but would respond with "everything available" if attacked, and separately claiming that if Belarus's very existence were threatened, Russia would be treaty-bound to join its defense under their mutual agreements. He signed a decree that same period authorizing the conscription of reserve officers to expand the country's available manpower. Though it's worth noting Belarus has actually conducted similar reserve call-ups annually since the start of the full invasion in 2022. So this specific move sits somewhere between routine planning and genuine escalation, and reasonable analysts disagree about which side of that line it actually falls on.
Then, more recently, in a striking reversal that got far less coverage than his earlier threats, Lukashenko went in front of Saudi state television and essentially apologized for his harsher comments towards Zelensky, calling for trilateral talks between Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine to end the fighting and pointing out that Belarusians and Ukrainians share deep family and historical ties along a border that, in his words, "effectively didn't exist for most of his life." He said national leaders should be looking out for their own citizens' interests rather than threatening each other, before in the same stretch of interviews admitting something genuinely remarkable: that if Russia tried to attack Kyiv from Belarusian territory again, the front line would stretch for hundreds of kilometers along the Belarus-Ukraine border, and in his own words, "he and Russia together would not actually be able to defend that stretch of land." Read that twice. The president of Belarus, on the record, said his own military alliance with Russia might not be capable of holding that front. That is not the statement of a confident junior partner. That is a statement of a man trying to talk his way out of a war he knows his own country cannot survive being dragged into. And it's worth remembering that this is coming from someone who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist since 1994, who has jailed and exiled his political opponents for decades, and who has almost never before publicly admitted a limit on what he and Moscow together could accomplish militarily. When a leader like that suddenly starts talking about what he can't defend, that's not weakness leaking out by accident. That's a calculated signal aimed simultaneously at Kyiv, at Moscow, and increasingly at Washington, where American officials have separately been holding talks with Belarus that have already led to the release of hundreds of detainees—the West considers political prisoners—in exchange for a partial easing of sanctions. Talk serious enough that Lukashenko may soon visit the United States itself, according to comments from the American envoy handling that relationship.
And yet, on the ground, the military picture points in the opposite direction of caution. Russia has deployed its Iskander hypersonic nuclear-capable missile system into Belarus, upping the stakes in its broader standoff with NATO. In May, Russian and Belarusian forces conducted joint nuclear drills, explicitly practicing the delivery and preparation of nuclear munitions together in cooperation with Russian forces. Even as both governments insisted the exercises weren't aimed at any third country and posed no threat to regional security. Those drills came amid a broader collapse of the arms control architecture that used to govern exactly this kind of escalation. The New START treaty, which had capped American and Russian nuclear arsenals for years, expired back in February, and Russia separately tested its Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile. In the months since, formally releasing both countries from a set of restrictions that had at least provided some predictability. German security officials have gone as far as estimating that Russia now has something in the range of two full army corps, potentially as many as 360,000 troops stationed inside Belarus, close enough to strike directly at NATO's eastern flank, and warning that 2026 and 2027 could be the most dangerous years yet along that border, with one German security expert specifically cautioning against naively assuming that diplomatic talks in Berlin would be enough to head off further escalation. Whether that specific troop figure holds up to independent scrutiny is genuinely disputed among analysts, and I want to be honest with you that a single politician's estimate is not the same thing as a verified order of battle, but the direction of travel underneath the number is not in dispute: more missiles, more drills, more forward-deployed capability dressed up in a diplomatic language of mutual defense that Lukashenko himself now seems privately unsure Russia can actually deliver on when it counts.
There's a wider regional angle here too that connects Belarus directly back to that Baltic standoff we just talked about. American officials have reportedly warned Poland that Russia may be planning some kind of armed provocation on Polish soil, specifically to test NATO's resolve: a drone or missile strike on Polish infrastructure, or even a deliberate incursion by Russian or Belarusian soldiers across the border, potentially disguised as an accident involving a lost patrol or a malfunctioning helicopter that needed rescuing. The stated goal of a provocation like that, according to sources citing that reporting, would be to force Western allies into suspending aid to Ukraine by manufacturing exactly the kind of crisis where hesitation looks safer than confrontation. And notice the geography. Poland sits directly between Belarus and the West, bordering both Belarus itself and the heavily militarized Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which means the Baltic Sea confrontations with Germany and its theoretical Belarus-adjacent provocation against Poland aren't actually separate flashpoints on a map. They're two ends of the same pressure Russia is applying against NATO's eastern and northern edges simultaneously, testing which alliance member blinks first and under what kind of provocation.
So step back with me and look at the shape of the whole week. In Tehran, Russia shows up with just enough weight to be seen standing beside an ally under attack while carefully avoiding any commitment that would put Russian forces or Russian credibility on the line if Iran's situation gets worse. In the Baltic, Russian warships openly confront European coast guards and lawmakers to keep the oil money flowing while the Kremlin insists straight-faced that it's the West doing the provoking. And in Belarus, Russia deploys nuclear-capable missiles and runs joint nuclear exercises with a partner whose own president has publicly admitted the alliance might not be able to actually hold the line if it came to a real fight, even as Washington quietly works a separate diplomatic channel with that same partner behind Moscow's back. Three different theaters, three different sets of adversaries: Israel and the United States in one, Germany and NATO in another, Ukraine and its Western backers in the third. But the exact same underlying move in every single case: Project maximum confidence, commit the minimum possible resources, and let the other side guess which one is real.
The uncomfortable question, the one I think is actually worth sitting with after everything you just heard, is what happens the day one of those three bluffs actually gets called. Because bluffs work right up until the moment somebody stops backing off. And when a German coast guard captain or an Israeli air force pilot or a Ukrainian commander eyeing the Belarusian border finally decides not to yield, Moscow will have to choose in real time which of its three fronts it's actually willing to fight for. My guess, and I'll be honest that it's a guess, is that Russia itself doesn't fully know the answer yet either. And that uncertainty sitting right at the center of the Kremlin's own decision-making might be the single most dangerous variable in this entire picture. Because uncertain actors under pressure don't always choose the rational option. Sometimes they choose the option that lets them save face in front of their own domestic audience, regardless of what it costs everyone else.
Tell me, which of these three flashpoints do you think is most likely to actually explode this year: Iran, the Baltic, or Belarus?