Earlier this month, just days into the war with Iran, multiple news organizations, including MS NOW, reported that Russia provided Iran with information that could help it strike American targets. One U.S. official told MS NOW point-blank, “Russia is providing intelligence help to Iran.”
It wasn’t long before lingering doubts about the accuracy of the reporting evaporated. Iranian officials have publicly confirmed Russia’s “military cooperation”; U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz acknowledged Russia’s wartime “strategic partnership” with Iran; and Democratic senator Adam Schiff of California, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said matter-of-factly that Russia “is providing intelligence to Iran to better attack and kill American troops.”
Last week, The Wall Street Journal advanced the broader story, reporting that Russia recently expanded its intelligence-sharing and military cooperation with Iran, “providing satellite imagery and improved drone technology to aid Tehran’s targeting of U.S. forces in the region.”
On Monday, MS NOW reported:
Ukraine’s military intelligence has ‘irrefutable’ evidence that Russia has provided intelligence to the Iranian regime, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post on X today.
‘Russia is using its own signals intelligence and electronic intelligence capabilities, as well as part of the data obtained through cooperation with partners in the Middle East,’ Zelenskyy said, citing a report from Ukrainian Chief of Defense Intelligence Oleh Ivashchenko.
To be sure, Ukraine has a vested interest in convincing the United States that Russia is playing a direct role in helping Iran during the war, and in theory this would ordinarily be about the time that the White House would want to take a closer look at the evidence out of Kyiv.
But in practice, the question isn’t whether Zelenskyy is correct, it’s whether Donald Trump cares.
By all appearances, he does not.
The initial reaction from the American president and his team to the original allegations was to express total indifference. This was soon followed by news that the Republican administration agreed effectively to reward Vladimir Putin’s regime by temporarily easing oil sanctions on the country — twice.
All the while, top members of Team Trump publicly vouched for Russia’s trustworthiness and echoed Kremlin talking points.
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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