François Picard is pleased to welcome Anna Borshchevskaya, Senior Fellow at The Washington Institute. She interprets Russia’s reported missile support for Iran not as an isolated arms transaction, but as part of a broader geopolitical strategy in which Moscow treats Ukraine, Iran, NATO, and the United States as interconnected fronts. In her analysis, Vladimir Putin’s objective is less about pursuing direct military confrontation with Washington than about altering the strategic environment around it: strengthening actors hostile to the United States, increasing the costs of American and Israeli military action, and repeatedly probing Western thresholds for retaliation.
Putin relentlessly tests where Western “red lines” actually lie rather than where Western governments say they lie: Russian drones entering NATO territory, cyberattacks, disinformation, support for Iran, and the continuing war in Ukraine become different expressions of the same strategic logic. Her “bigger chessboard” metaphor captures this interpretation particularly well. It presents Putin as connecting geographically distinct conflicts through a common calculus of pressure, escalation, and opportunity.
There is also an important political dimension to her argument. Borshchevskaya suggests that Moscow has a strong interest in the survival of the existing Iranian regime, because the emergence of a pro-Western government in Tehran would represent a major strategic setback for Russia. On this reading, Russian military assistance does more than improve Iranian capabilities: it helps preserve a regional order advantageous to Moscow. Her broader warning is that insufficiently enforced Western red lines can themselves become strategically consequential, encouraging further attempts to determine just how far Russia can go.
