Khamenei asks Putin for more help after US strikes on Iran

ISTANBUL/MOSCOW - Iran's supreme leader sent his foreign minister to Moscow on Monday to ask President Vladimir Putin for more help from Russia after the biggest US military action against the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution over the weekend.

US President Donald Trump and Israel have publicly speculated about killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and about regime change, a step Russia fears could further destabilize the Middle East.

While Putin has condemned the Israeli strikes, he has yet to comment on the US attacks on Iranian nuclear sites though he last week called for calm and offered Moscow's services as a mediator over the nuclear programme.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi was due to deliver a letter from Khamenei to Putin, seeking the latter's backing, a senior source told Reuters.

Iran has not been impressed with Russia's support so far, Iranian sources told Reuters, and the country wants Putin to do more to back it against Israel and the United States. The sources did not elaborate on what assistance Tehran wanted.

The Kremlin said that Putin would receive Araqchi but did not say what would be discussed.

Araqchi was quoted by the state TASS news agency as saying that Iran and Russia were coordinating their positions on the current escalation in the Middle East.

Russia, a longstanding ally of Tehran, plays a role in Iran's nuclear negotiations with the West as a veto-wielding UN Security Council member and signatory to an earlier nuclear deal Trump abandoned during his first term in 2018.

But Putin, whose army is fighting a major war of attrition in Ukraine for the fourth year, has shown little appetite for a confrontation with the US over Iran just as Trump seeks to repair ties with Moscow.

MEDIATION

Putin has repeatedly offered to mediate between the US and Iran, and has conveyed Moscow's ideas on resolving the conflict to them while ensuring Iran's access to civil nuclear energy.

Putin said Israel had given Moscow assurance on the safety of Russian specialists helping to build two more reactors at the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran during air strikes.

While Moscow has bought weapons from Iran for its war in Ukraine and signed a 20-year strategic partnership deal with Tehran earlier this year, their relationship - which spans centuries - has at times been troubled.

The partnership deal does not contain a mutual defence clause.

Inside Russia, there were calls for Russia to support Iran in the same way Washington has supported Ukraine - including air defence systems, missiles and satellite intelligence.

At the UN Security Council on Sunday, Russia, China and Pakistan proposed the 15-member body adopt a resolution calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in the Middle East after US strikes.

Russia's UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia recalled former US Secretary of State Colin Powell making the case at the UN Security Council in 2003 that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein constituted an imminent danger to the world because of the country's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

"Again we're being asked to believe the US's fairy tales, to once again inflict suffering on millions of people living in the Middle East. This cements our conviction that history has taught our US colleagues nothing," he said.