Aleksander Griboyedov, a tsarist-era ambassador to Persia still seen as a role model for Russian diplomats, was shot dead, his body mutilated and thrown on a rubbish heap in Tehran 197 years ago.

The bespectacled 34-year-old ambassador to Persia was known among Russian aristocrats as a Renaissance man who penned a still-popular waltz, poems and a groundbreaking play, “Woe from Wit”, which remains part of the curriculum in Russia today.

A tireless polyglot, fearless soldier and shrewd diplomat, Griboyedov dared to refuse Iranian Shah Fath-Ali’s demand to give up fugitive Armenians - a eunuch in charge of the royal treasury and two women from a harem - who were taking refuge in the Russian embassy.

They wanted to move to the Russia-conquered areas of today’s Armenia, and under the newly signed Treaty of Turkmenchay, Russian subjects and Christian minorities were allowed to cross into Russian-controlled areas. The diplomat’s protection of the fugitives also touched on political and religious sensitivities.

Angered by Griboyedov’s refusal, tens of thousands of enraged Persians stormed the embassy on February 11, 1829, killing the ambassador and dozens of diplomats and Cossack cavalrymen.

But the roots of the anti-Russian riot lay much deeper.

A blood diamond

In January 1829, Griboyedov was charged with collecting a colossal 20 million silver rubles - more than $20 billion in relative wealth - from Tehran after Iran lost the 1826-28 Russia-Persian war, a costly sign of Russia’s new leverage.

Griboyedov understood the impact of this huge fine on the Persian economy.

“Dire straits beyond any description,” he said, telling how the contribution bled Persia dry and how the shah’s family pitched in by having their golden chandeliers melted and buttons made of precious stones removed from their clothes.

The tsarist state also annexed most of what is now Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia - along with Dagestan, which remains Russia’s most polyethnic province.

Following the embassy killings and death of Griboyedov, Persia feared Russian retaliation. So, in August 1829, it sent the shah’s grandson to St. Petersburg, Russia’s imperial capital, to give Nicholas I the Persian Diamond, a gift he accepted during a ceremony at the Winter Palace. The crown jewel, a yellowish, octahedral diamond that weighed 89 carats, once belonged to India’s Great Mughals. The diamond remains in Moscow today.

Griboyedov, whose bronze, stained statue stands in central Moscow, is still revered by Russian diplomats. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov mentioned him in a 2020 speech, noting that Griboyedov was among "our great predecessors" who "sacrificed their lives for our homeland”.

“Griboyedov’s death is the best-known cultural episode in the confrontation” between Russia and Iran,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta Center, a political think tank in Kyiv.

Cossack turned Shah

For the rest of the 19th century, Russia kept chipping away at Persia’s northern and eastern provinces in the South Caucasus and Central Asia. It saw Persia as an inferior, “Asiatic” client state and turned it into a powerless pawn in the “Great Game” with the British Empire over Central Asia.

But to counter London’s growing clout in Persia, Tsar Alexander II helped Tehran found the Russian-Persian Cossack Brigade in 1879.

The military unit was modelled on the Cossacks - elite troops who had spearheaded Russia’s imperial expansion. Originating in what is now central Ukraine, they fused nomadic cavalry tactics and firearms into a lethal combination that could only be countered by machine guns during World War I.

Within a few years, the brigade became Persia’s most formidable and feared military unit - similar in some ways to imperial Rome’s praetorian guard or Turkish janissaries, which toppled or enthroned emperors and sultans - helping the future Shah, Reza Pahlevi. begin his rise to power.

In 1920, the nascent Soviet government tried to turn northern Persia into a Communist republic. But the Gilan Soviet Republic collapsed by late 1921 as Reza Khan’s forces crushed it and Soviet support evaporated.

After World War II, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin demanded exclusive oil concessions from Iran - Persia became internationally recognised as Iran in 1935 - threatening to turn Iranian Kurdistan into an independent state.

Unsurprisingly, after Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlevi found a way out of the oil concession and regained Kurdistan, he preferred to distance himself from Moscow and sought an alliance with the West.

Even after the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the Pahlevi dynasty, Iran’s new theocratic government often dubbed the officially atheist Soviet Russia, “the little Satan”, a term usually reserved for Israel.

But the Soviet collapse in 1991 led to a shift in diplomatic ties between the two powers.

Strategic allies?

In the 1990s, Iran no longer needed to fear Russian expansionism. Russia had started to see Iran as an essential ally for maintaining influence in the Middle East. So Moscow began using its veto power in the United Nations Security Council to delay or block international sanctions against Iran. In turn, Tehran spent billions on Russian weaponry, fighter jets, helicopters, air defences and small arms.

In 1997, Moscow and Tehran helped negotiate a peace deal to end the 1991-1994 civil war in ex-Soviet Tajikistan that shares close cultural links with Iran.

Recently, the Kremlin-run nuclear monopoly, Rosatom, finished the German-designed Bushehr nuclear power plant and, in 2025, signed a $25 billion deal to build four more nuclear power plants in southern Iran.

Today, Russian energy companies extract about six percent of Iran’s oil and natural gas output, and Moscow is building a North-South transport corridor to carry Russian oil to the Indian Ocean.

Moscow also let Tehran use its Baikonur cosmodrome in 2022 to launch the Khayyam, Iran’s main optical imaging satellite. Its lenses have a resolution of one metre (3.3 feet) - enough to monitor warship movement in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean.

But Russia-Iran ties appear to be a marriage of convenience.

“The main reason they’re coming closer is exclusively pragmatism considering their isolation,” Nikita Smagin, an expert on Russia-Iran ties and best-selling author, told Global News Insight.

“They don’t like each other.”

“Historically, Iranians have nothing but negative [memories] about Russia,” Smagin added. “In Iran, even conservative mass media say that Russia can’t be trusted.”

The countries are united, however, by their decades-old distrust of U.S. policies in their former stomping grounds of Ukraine, Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

“What unites them is a common enemy or a common geopolitical challenge,” the Penta Center’s Fesenko said. “That’s what this friendship against America is about, ideologically and geopolitically.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has emphasised these relations as a strategic priority.

“Our ties are simply those of allies,” Putin said in 2024 during a summit of BRICS, the group of emerging economies which include Russia, India and China.

To try to offset the dominance of Western institutions, Putin lobbied in 2023 for the inclusion of Iran in the group. Tehran joined in early 2024, and the bloc has since been known as BRICS+.

The Russian leader sees Tehran as a key Middle Eastern ally that can help Moscow counter Turkiye’s growing influence - and project an image of a “Muslim-friendly” nation, despite the Kremlin’s complicated relationship with Muslims at home.

The alliance appeared to peak in 2015, when Moscow and Tehran rushed to save Syrian President Bashar Assad’s collapsing regime. Russian servicemen were the first foreign soldiers to operate on Iranian soil since the end of World War II.

Over the past decade, China has joined Iran and Russia, aligning on mutual anti-American interests.

“In recent years, a stable configuration of interests between Russia, Iran and China was formed,” said Emil Mustafayev, chief editor of the Minval Politika magazine based in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan.

“It’s not a formal alliance in the classic sense, but rather a strategic rapprochement based on the common unacceptance of Western pressure, and a striving to revisit the existing world order,” he explained to Global News Insight.

But China is the mightiest and least active part of the triangle, Smagin said.

“In this triangle, China is the strongest and so far the most cautious side,” he said. “China didn’t rush to save Iran at all. Russia is more active, but it doesn’t have as many resources and capabilities as China.”

Early last year, Moscow and Tehran signed the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty, but they still have no agreement on mutual defence. The reason for this is also rooted in Russia’s ties in the region.

Marriage of convenience?

Moscow never severed its ties with Iran’s main adversaries in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

“Russia naturally tried to keep its clout in the region and tried to put its eggs in various baskets,” Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who quit his foreign ministry job to protest the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, told Global News Insight.

Russia has also remained on good terms with Israel, whose politicians constantly seek the electoral support of a sizeable, Russian-speaking community of Soviet-born Jews.

In 2009, Israeli President Shimon Peres told this reporter in Moscow that his visit was aimed at convincing the Kremlin to “reconsider” the sale of advanced S-300 air defence systems to Tehran.

Moscow suspended the sale until 2016, and Iran’s systems proved helpless against Israel’s US-built F-16 fighter jets, which jammed their radars and destroyed many of them in 2024.

In 2012, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed Putin in Jerusalem, declaring afterwards that they both agreed “that nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran pose a grave danger, first for Israel but also for the region and the whole world”.

Putin said that talks with Iran were the only solution and added that peace in Israel was in Russia’s “national interest”.

Moscow and Tehran also remain rivals over their crucial, most lucrative export to China: crude oil.

“It is fair to describe the relationship between Russia and Iran as a marriage of convenience rather than a formal alliance — a pragmatic partnership rather than an ideological coalition,” Dr. Seyed Ali Alavi, a lecturer in Middle Eastern and Iranian Studies at the University of London, wrote in 2023.

The question today is whether that pragmatic partnership is meeting its ultimate test amid the US-Israeli war on Iran and the continuing war in Ukraine.

Drones over Ukraine

When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Iran reiterated its “neutrality,” abstaining or voting against UN resolutions condemning the war.

But Iran's supreme leader sounded far from neutral.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that Washington’s “mafia regime” needed “crisis spots all over the world” and made Ukraine its “victim”.

“Support by Western governments for administrations and politicians that have been installed by them is a mirage,” he said in an hour-long speech on March 1, 2022, referring to Ukraine’s pro-Western government.

Four months later, Putin visited Tehran, where he heard another anti-Western barb.

“In case of Ukraine, had you not shown your initiative, the other side would have started the war,” Khamenei told Putin, echoing Moscow's narrative about NATO and the collective West that “instigated” the war.

“If [NATO] had not been stopped in Ukraine, it would have started a war [with Russia], using [annexed] Crimea as a pretext,” he said.

Putin seemed pleased with the remarks and replied that “the way the West behaves left Russia no other choice”.

But the Russian leader was even more pleased by Iran moving from neutrality to providing direct military support, supplying Shahed (“Martyr”) drones.

Known as Geran-2, the Russian Shaheds were heavily modified, and the most recent ones have jet engines or can launch small missiles at fighter jets, according to Ukraine’s military intelligence.

Iran has also provided Russia with ammunition, helmets and flak jackets.

After the US-Israeli attacks on Iran started in February, Moscow returned the favour, sending some modified Shaheds back to Iran with the Kometa-B satellite navigation module, which helps avoid jamming.

One of them, launched by Iran-backed Hezbollah from southern Lebanon, hit a British airbase on Cyprus on March 1, reported The Times newspaper in the UK.

Moscow has provided Tehran with data from Liana, Russia’s only fully functional system of spy satellites, on the location of U.S.-military infrastructure in the Middle East, according to military expert Pavel Luzin.

Russia condemned the Israeli and US attacks that killed Khamenei on February 28, but one thing Putin never considered was sending troops to help Iran.

“This situation is a blow to Putin’s image that yet again shows that he is incapable of really helping his partners, his allies,” Ruslan Suleymanov, an associate fellow at the New Eurasian Strategies Center, a US-British think tank, told Global News Insight.

Some analysts had even suggested that the Moscow-Tehran alliance would not survive the Iran conflict because the Kremlin was eager to trade ties with Iran for Washington’s concessions on Ukraine.

Moscow “surely can propose” to swap Iran for Ukraine, former diplomat Bondarev said.

But “what they can offer [on Iran] is obviously less than what they want to get in Ukraine”, he said, referring to Russia’s demands to cede the remaining part of the Donbas region as a precondition for peace talks.

“Moscow would gladly give up Iran for concessions, serious concessions on Ukraine,” Smagin said.

“The swapping of Iran for Ukraine would undoubtedly be in the Kremlin’s interests, and it would have done it,” he said.

But the time for that has passed, Smagin added. No such deal is likely now, he says, because of the European Union’s role in the Ukraine peace talks.

Seeing the Russian-Ukrainian war as an existential threat to the EU, Brussels opposes Washington’s “peace at any price” proposals regarding the Russian-Ukrainian war and Moscow’s demands to limit Ukraine’s armed forces.

Russia may promise Washington and Tel Aviv to stop providing satellite and intelligence data to Iran if Washington stops providing similar data to the Ukrainian army, Smagin said.

But Suleymanov believes some “haggling” between Moscow and Washington is only possible if Moscow is chosen as a mediator in talks.

While Russia has helped pass along messages from the various sides, Pakistan has been chosen to mediate the U.S.-Israel-Iran talks.

That choice emphasises the insignificance of Moscow and its alliance with Iran in global affairs, according to Mustafayev.

And there’s another reason Moscow hasn’t been chosen as mediator: few have forgotten Russia’s breach of trust.

After the 1991 Soviet collapse, Kyiv had the world’s third-largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Moscow and Washington guaranteed Kyiv’s security in return for Ukraine’s abandonment of Ukrainian nuclear weapons.

Thirty years later, Moscow annexed Crimea and backed separatists in southeastern Ukraine.

“Mediation requires trust from all participants, and that’s the resource Russia doesn’t have today,” Mustafayev said.