WASHINGTON — While Donald Trump brags about his “maximum pressure” campaign to impoverish Iran and force its leaders to give up its nuclear program, there remains one source of revenue that the president appears to be OK with: Iran’s sale to Russia of deadly drones, missiles and technical expertise to help slaughter Ukrainian civilians.
Iran has earned at least tens of millions of dollars, perhaps many hundreds of millions, from its agreement to supply weapons to Russia over the past two years. And while that deal drew new sanctions against both countries under former President Joe Biden, it appears to have received no pushback from Trump.
“Not sure why specifically the Trump administration is not making this an issue with Russia,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in its early years after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
“The Trump administration has not addressed the ‘Axis of Upheaval’ as it was called under Biden — the increasing cooperation between Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea — in a forceful way,” said Liana Fix, a Ukraine analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations.
When asked by HuffPost why he has not done anything to stop Iranian drone and missile sales to Russia, even as the U.S. cracks down on Iranian oil sales, Trump — who has long defended Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and who initially called Putin’s 2022 invasion a “genius” move — did not answer the question and instead offered a rambling explanation acknowledging the lethality of Iranian drones.
“I’m getting reports on that and we’re looking at a report. You’re right, they make a lot of drones. Iran makes a lot of drones. They make very effective drones too. They do very effectively at some things. But Iran is very high on my list of things to watch,” he said during a recent Oval Office question-and-answer session.
HuffPost’s follow-up queries to the White House, the Treasury Department and the State Department on this topic all went unanswered over a period of weeks.
As Russia depleted its own stocks of weaponry in the first year of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it turned to North Korea for artillery rounds and to Iran for sophisticated short-range ballistic missiles and drones, including the notorious Shahed-136.
That relationship continues, even after Trump’s Feb. 4 “maximum pressure” memorandum designed to deny “the regime and its terror proxies access to revenue.”
Yet even the language of the order avoids any mention of Iran’s new alliance with Russia. It states that Iran “bears responsibility” for Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the Houthi rebels’ ongoing attacks on Red Sea shipping — but does not say a word about Russia’s use of Iranian arms to kill Ukrainians.
An April 1 announcement of new sanctions by the Treasury Department regarding Iran’s weapons sales names entities in Iran, the United Arab Emirates and China — but fails to address Russia at all.
“It is apparently unwilling to pressure Putin in any meaningful way,” said Pifer, who is now with the Brookings Institution. “If it wanted to, it has significant potential leverage over Moscow. The U.S. government could tighten economic sanctions and work with G7 to seize frozen Russian Central Bank assets. It should have started to apply some of this leverage after it became clear that Putin did not accept the U.S. proposal for a full 30-day ceasefire.”
That Iran is getting a pass on its sale of deadly weapons to Russia is just one of numerous signs that, under Trump, the United States has effectively switched sides on the Ukraine war.
Instead of supporting the victim of the largest invasion in Europe since World War II as the U.S. did under Biden, the country is now backing the aggressor and its dictator as Russia continues to kill civilians in Ukrainian cities.
“Trump has basically made enough concessions to Russia already that he is objectively on Russia’s side,” said John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers during his first term. “After all, he thinks he and Putin are friends. That’s the strategy.”
The day after a missile attack murdered 38 in the town of Sumy as residents were celebrating Palm Sunday, Trump during an Oval Office photo opportunity suggested that somehow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was responsible.
“You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” he told reporters. “When you start a war, you got to know you can win.”
Days earlier, Trump adviser Steven Witkoff suggested the best way to end the war would be to allow Russia to keep four eastern provinces, or “oblasts” — a concession that would reward Putin for having invaded his neighbor and killed tens of thousands of its citizens.
Then, on Wednesday, the United States was among just nine countries, Russia and Belarus among them, to vote against a United Nations resolution naming Russia as the aggressor in the conflict. The U.S. had in February voted against a resolution calling on Russia to withdraw from Ukraine.
In another photo opportunity on Friday, Trump denied that Putin was manipulating him and then blamed Putin’s invasion on his predecessor, Biden. “This is Biden’s war,” he said.
“We have switched sides both literally, including in terms of multiple U.N. votes on which we sided with Moscow over our allies, and in spirit, in the sense that we no longer stand on the side of democracy, freedom and independence,” said Ned Price, a former spokesman for the National Security Council in the Barack Obama White House and for the State Department under Biden.
Added Olivia Troye, a White House national security adviser during Trump’s first term: “I said this would happen if Trump got elected and here we are. It’s happening. We are abandoning Ukraine officially and siding with dictators.”
“Everything this administration is doing seems to be in alliance with Russia,” she added. “My worry is that by the time Americans wake up and realize this — MAGA included — and regret it, it will be too late. The significant damage is happening right now before our very eyes, and most don’t see it or understand it.”