Two weeks ago, the co-founder of a think tank affiliated with the Russian Ministry of Defense, Ruslan Pukhov, accidentally admitted on Russian TV what Moscow has been denying for several weeks – Russian forces are using Iranian drones to bombard Ukrainian cities, killing civilians. Implicitly criticizing the Russian authorities for being secretive about the deal, Pukhov compared the topic of Iranian drones with a body part. "There’s an a** but you can’t use the word," he said, adding "we all know they are Iranian, but the powers that be don’t acknowledge it."
Drones, in fact, are not the only type of military assistance that the Ayatollahs are handing to Putin as Iran emerges as the principal backer of Putin’s savage war on Ukraine. What most Americans do not realize is that President Biden and his reckless policies have been enabling the dangerous Moscow-Tehran Alliance. The implications for U.S. security could be catastrophic.
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Iranian drones are filling critical gaps in Russian weapons arsenal, as Putin’s forces are tearing down Ukrainian infrastructure, leaving Ukrainians without electricity, heat and water as winter fast approaches. Putin knows that creating a humanitarian disaster in Ukraine is a sure way to continue depleting the U.S. Treasury, which has already committed billions to help Ukraine defend its borders and democracy. Assuming Biden is over his frustration with Zelenskyy’s continuous demands for U.S. dollars - it was reported this week that Biden lost his temper with the Ukrainian president over a paucity of gratitude for American largesse - he will likely dispatch yet another security assistance package to Kyiv. This will almost certainly place additional burden on taxpayers who are already struggling with high food and gas prices. Acutely aware that recession is gaining a foothold in America, Russia’s Putin, who views economic devastation as part of modern warfare, will gladly help Biden to tip the U.S. over the edge.
Russia’s recruitment via Iran of U.S.-trained Afghan commandos to bolster its forces in Ukraine, a situation that the Pentagon is "monitoring," is a direct result of the Biden administration’s chaotic pullout of Afghanistan in August 2021. Approximately 3,000 Afghan military and support personnel, including high-ranking officers who assisted U.S. forces during the 20-year war in Afghanistan, fled to Iran because they faced persecution in their own country as the Taliban took control. Abandoned by the Washington that spent $90 billion to build the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces and having no means of survival, some of them are now volunteering to fight in Ukraine.
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It is bad enough that the U.S. government spent $2.2 trillion and sacrificed 6,000 American lives only to have the same characters, the Taliban, run the country. Twenty years later, Afghanistan remains the same hellhole it has been for decades. The gift of botched the Afghanistan withdrawal by the Biden administration keeps on giving. U.S. military secrets and sensitive top-of-the-line combat training that U.S. special forces shared with Afghan security forces is now available not only to Iran, but to its strategic partner, Russia. Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, warned about this grave threat in his 2021 report "Strategic Failure: Assessing the Administration’s Afghanistan Withdrawal."
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Russia and Iran, both under severe U.S. economic sanctions, have joined forces to counter what Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi calls the "Great Satan," the United States, just as Iranian regime has been struggling to quell the protests against its oppressive rule. These two most aggressive U.S. adversaries are as close as ever today.
Having signed the Memorandum on Defense Cooperation in 2019, Russia and Iran conduct joint naval drills and share sensitive technology. In August, Russia, launched an Iranian satellite that could help Tehran track the movements of Ukrainian troops, a seemingly insignificant development. However, space launch is a dual-use technology, which powers both a GPS-like capability and a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile that the Iranian regime has been eager to develop, in order to target the U.S. homeland. Having Russia, which is the world’s leader in space launch and is the only country that rivals America in the nuclear weapons expertise, in Iran’s corner poses a strategic menace to our country.
Furthermore, both Russia and Iran are parties to President Biden and former President Obama’s Iran delusion nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. This misguided accord illustrates the strategic incompetence of the Biden Administration. If signed, it will grant Iran sanctions relief, bringing hundreds of billions of dollars not only to Iran, but to Russia's coffers as well," as former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently noted.
All while helping Putin continue to fund his war on Ukraine and enabling Iran’s progress toward gaining nuclear weapons, which will inevitably be pointing at Washington and New York.
