A little over 48 hours before Iran's aerial message to Israel across the skies of West Asia, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov confirmed, on the record, what so far had been, at best, hush-hush diplomatic talk:
The Russian side keeps in contact with Iranian partners on the situation in the Middle East after the Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Syria.Ryabkov added, "We stay in constant touch [with Iran]. New in-depth discussions on the whole range of issues related to the Middle East are also expected in the near future in BRICS."
He then sketched The Big Picture:
Connivance with Israeli actions in the Middle East, which are at the core of Washington's policy, is in many ways becoming the root cause of new tragedies.Here, concisely, we had Russia's top diplomatic coordinator with BRICS - in the year of the multipolar organization's Russian presidency - indirectly messaging that Russia has Iran's back. Iran, it should be noted, just became a full-fledged BRICS+ member in January.
Iran's aerial message this weekend confirmed this in practice: their missile guidance systems used the Chinese Beidou satellite navigation system as well as the Russian GLONASS system.
This is Russia-China intel leading from behind and a graphic example of BRICS+ on the move.
Ryabkov's "we stay in constant touch" plus the satellite navigation intel confirms the deeply interlocked cooperation between the Russia-China strategic partnership and their mutual strategic partner Iran. Based on vast experience in Ukraine, Moscow knew that the biblical psychopathic genocidal entity would keep escalating if Iran only continued to exercise "strategic patience."
The morphing of "strategic patience" into a new strategic balance had to take some time - including high-level exchanges with the Russian side. After all, the risk remained that the Israeli attack against the Iranian consulate/ambassador's residence in Damascus could well prove to be the 2024 remix of the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Comment: Whilst Israel may have had some success with its Western-backed genocide in Gaza, it made little headway in its efforts against Hamas there. And now, following Iran's exploratory, and rather humiliating, retaliation, Tel Aviv has allegedly chosen to pause its Rafah offensive.
Taken together, Israel seems to be losing any semblance of dominance over its chaos creation, and which is possibly the point when the situation becomes even more dangerous: