Politics

What Russia learned from the 12-day Israel-Iran war

There are political and military inferences from last month’s battle. Whether on air defences, sabotage operations, or equipment maintenance, ministries will be making notes and changing plans.

Alexander Kazakov/Sputnik via Reuters

Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov attends a meeting on the development strategy of the Russian Navy submarine forces held by President Vladimir Putin in Severodvinsk, Arkhangelsk region, Russia July 24, 2025.

What Russia learned from the 12-day Israel-Iran war

Anton Mardasov

last update on 27 Jul 2025

Following the recent 12-day war between Israel and Iran, military analysts around the world will be assessing effectiveness of combatants’ decisions, evaluating military forces and their capabilities, and adjusting their predictions and expectations based on this newly-received intelligence. This is no less true in Moscow than elsewhere.

Discussing such hot topics with a cool head is crucial to avoid “failures of imagination” and break through the information noise and false narratives so seemingly prevalent in international politics these days. A lot can be inferred from who did what—or, rather, who did not to what—during those 12 days, meaning that the lessons learned are not just military but diplomatic and political.

Of particular interest is the relationship between Russia and Iran. Earlier this year, on 17 January, Russian-Iranian Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty made much noise, which in turn created an aura of significance. A whole operation, including officials’ statements and the authorised feeding of information, seemed intended to demonstrate strengthened strategic cooperation between Tehran and Moscow. It perpetuated an illusion divorced from reality.

Lancing the myth

For Russian analysts, there was no doubt that the Kremlin would enter the war on the side of Iran, even if much of its resources were not currently tied up in Ukraine. Dig deeper, beyond their relationship of convenience, and there is a deficit of trust between Iran and Russia. As a result, Moscow may only ever have been expected to offer a ‘pat on the shoulder’. Now this has been borne out during combat, it may finally put an end to talk of an emerging ‘axis’ involving Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea.

Reuters — Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov in international waters off the coast of Northern Norway on October 17, 2016.

Moscow has learned from both its mistakes and its successes in Ukraine. The invasion revealed both military and political miscalculations. There is now an effort to overcome the inertia of its own bureaucratic politico-military system to correct these missteps. Whether Russia’s leadership takes account of the learning from 12 days of war in June remains to be seen.

Publicly, no military conclusions have been drawn, only political, namely that if the nuclear issue is to be resolved once-and-for-all, it can only be done diplomatically. But it is logical that the Kremlin will be learning military lessons from the Israel-Iran war involving the US, not least because Moscow sees itself as fighting NATO in Ukraine, and because Iran employed Russian air defence systems against Western aircraft.

Defence tested

Vladimir Denisov, a veteran Russian intelligence officer and former Deputy Secretary of the Russian Security Council, said Russian air defence assets had never been called into action against such a high-intensity enemy as that of Israeli and American aircraft during the 12-day conflict. This is of interest, because Russian military experts have long planned for a non-nuclear, US-led global missile strike against Russia.

The Kremlin will be learning military lessons from the war, not least because Moscow sees itself as fighting NATO in Ukraine

To some extent, the Israeli Air Force demonstrated the application of such a concept against the Iranian air defence system, but Iran did not use fighter aircraft to counter, partly due to the state of its outdated jets. Iranian missile targets are also of interest. Tehran generally refrained from striking obvious targets, such as IDF airfields and aerial refuelling tankers, which lets the Israeli Air Force operate so far from home. The extent to which missile facilities and bases were hit will relate to Russia's missile facilities in the east of the country, which may now come into sharper focus.

Some Western analysts refer to Israel's attack on Iran as a new type of military operation. Israel demonstrated its ability to combine precision strikes using guided missiles with sabotage by the army and intelligence services deep inside enemy territory that quickly destroyed Iran's air defence systems.

Roscosmos/AFP — A Soyuz-2.1b rocket booster with a number of Iranian satellites blasting off from the Vostochny cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, Russia.

For Moscow, this experience is highly relevant, given Western intelligence agencies' awareness of Russian invasion preparations in early February 2022, the scale of the military leaks that accompanied the start of the war, and the vulnerability of strategic bombers on the airfield to drones, as demonstrated by Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb. Such sabotage operations could also target missiles on the midcourse phase flight, given the military's increasing reliance on advanced technology.

Cause to review

The Israeli operation has provided Moscow with additional arguments for defending its priorities in the Ukrainian conflict and in dialogue with the West regarding a new European security architecture. According to Russian analysts, Israel's only international legal argument to justify strikes on Iran and its nuclear facilities was the right to self-defence.

However, this justification violates Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter. In the eyes of Vladislav Tolstykh, a researcher at the Russian Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, US-Israeli actions reanimate the narrative that some states have the right to use force only because they consider themselves civilised, while others are doomed to be labelled as 'rogue states'. The Kremlin will undoubtedly highlight these double standards and Israel's loose interpretation of the right to self-defence to justify its military campaign in Ukraine.

Viacheslav Ratynskyi/Reuters — A Ukrainian servicewoman fires a 2S7 Pion self-propelled gun at a position, as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues, on a frontline in Kherson region, Ukraine November 9, 2022.

For Tehran's religious, political, and military leadership, the 12-day war will lead to a revised system of deterrence. Yet although Iran appears to have been defeated—with Israel having quickly suppressed its air defence systems and secured control over Iranian airspace—it lives to fight another day, because there was no follow-up ground invasion to ensure the destruction of Iran's nuclear programme.

Moreover, despite its losses in equipment and manpower, Tehran retained more than 90% of its medium-range missile launchers, according to Russian experts' calculations, Israel having hit about 40 out of the more than 400 available. But the rhetoric of "victory" suggests that Iran may not even realise its own political and military miscalculations.

Learning from missteps

The Iranian establishment still does not rule out a nuclear deal, but instead of playing along with Trump, the Iranians talked up the safety of their centrifuges and spent fuel storage facilities, thus increasing the likelihood of a new Israeli operation. Now, Iran's existing non-nuclear deterrence against Israel and the US has completely collapsed.

For Tehran's religious, political, and military leadership, the 12-day war will lead to a revised system of deterrence

This relates not so much to the defeats of its proxy forces but to the Iranian generals' failed bet on the 'Syrian forward bridgehead' of deterrence and information (when the country was under the rule of Bashar al-Assad) and Iran's air defence and radars stationed in areas now known to be vulnerable to the Israelis' sudden massive raid.

Sergei Ilyin/AFP — Russia's President Vladimir Putin chairs a Security Council meeting via a videoconference at the Kremlin in Moscow on July 25, 2025.

The Kremlin will draw lessons regarding the extent to which it can rely on partners for military planning in an attempt to create problems for the West on the far frontiers. In Iran, there is now a major counterespionage operation underway, given the security breaches offering information that Israel used. Such measures align with the Kremlin's own actions as it combats Ukraine's extensive network of agents operating within Russia, including among Ukrainian refugees and relatives living in the country. Yet closing the country is a double-edged sword, as the 12-day war showed.

For Russian expert Vladimir Denisov, the technological backwardness of virtually all weapons systems in Iran's inventory was clearly demonstrated in June. This is undoubtedly the result of sanctions. Naturally, here, Russian analogies arise.

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