Putin, the other great loser of the Iran-US agreement

BarcelonaIn geopolitics, things change very quickly, and while a few weeks ago Vladimir Putin appeared to be one of the indirect winners of the Iran war, as the closure of Hormuz benefited his oil exports, now with the agreement to reopen the strait, the tables may have turned. At least that is what the European members of the G-7 intend, who plan to pressure Donald Trump to take advantage now to increase pressure on the Kremlin to desist from the occupation of Ukraine and agree to sign a peace deal. Trump himself has agreed, and he was seen in a friendly attitude chatting with Volodymyr Zelensky at the Evian summit in France.

What has changed? Basically two things. The first is that, with the reopening of Hormuz, the United States and the EU can once again impose sanctions on Russian oil and gas. The second is that the feeling on the battlefield is that the Ukrainians are resisting much better than expected and, on the other hand, the Russians are showing alarming signs of weakness. A European diplomatic source described it very graphically when he said that Trump now sees that the Russians are the "losers" and the Ukrainians the "winners".

And it is true that, in the last three years, Russia has practically not conquered more territory than it achieved in the first year of the conflict and, on the other hand, has had to assume catastrophic human losses (British intelligence speaks of half a million Russian soldiers dead) and the economic situation is reaching a breaking point, with price increases of 10% per year. For its part, Ukraine has taken advantage of European and American aid to turn its army into one of the best-prepared in the world for modern warfare, in which drones take center stage.

Zelensky also knew how to play his cards well in the Iranian conflict when he offered the help of his drone warfare experts to the Gulf monarchies. On the other hand, American secret services suspect that Moscow has helped the Iranian regime with information about the location of its military bases.

All this has turned Trump's perception of the conflict upside down and has cooled his affair with Putin. Furthermore, the American president is now eager to be able to sell another diplomatic success to his electoral base after a war that has been highly questioned internally. It seems that all the stars are aligned for decisions of impact to be made in Évian that will make Putin see that he has no chance of winning this war, and that all he is doing is collapsing the Russian economy and subjecting his people to enormous punishment. Obviously, the ideal would be for a political change to occur in Russia from within, but this, in an authoritarian and murderous regime like Putin's (let's remember the case of Navalny), is unthinkable.

What is curious is that Trump started the war hand in hand with Benjamin Netanyahu and, amidst criticism of the Europeans, has ended up distanced from the Israeli leader and eager to support the EU on the Ukrainian issue.