Latin America News Agency/Reuters

The wreckage of an Iranian-made Shahed drone that was launched by Russia and shot down by Ukraine, in Chernihiv oblast, Ukraine, May 14, 2023. Ukraine says it has become more successful at shooting down the loud and slow-moving Iranian drones.

The first known impact of an Iranian drone in the Ukraine war came late last August, when Russia used a delta-wing Shahed-136 to destroy an American-supplied M777 howitzer being used by Ukrainian troops.

Since then, Iran’s kamikaze and other drones have played a significant role in Russia’s campaign against Ukraine, first by shocking front-line Ukrainian troops with the precision targeting of their 80-pound explosive payloads, and then by flying them in waves against civilian and infrastructure targets across Ukraine.

Ukrainian forces are now adept at shooting down Iran’s slow-moving and noisy drones – their engines can sound like gas-powered lawn mowers. Nevertheless, the Iran-Russia military alliance is deepening, with an agriculture drone facility in the Tatarstan region, hundreds of miles east of Moscow, now reportedly turning to the joint production of Iranian drones.

The result for Iran is an unexpected and satisfying role reversal with Russia of their traditional patron-client relationship. It’s a demonstration of anti-Western solidarity in Russia’s hour of need – both nations are subject to comprehensive American and European sanctions – that Iran hopes will boost its geopolitical clout and lead to access to Russia’s advanced S-400 air defense system and Su-35 fighter aircraft.

Still, the price paid by Iran has been high. Siding so closely with Russia over Ukraine has made even a partial lifting of U.S. sanctions more remote. And as chances – already meager before Russia’s invasion – fade for a diplomatic arrangement slowing Iran’s nuclear progress in exchange for sanctions relief, the prospects for Iran’s struggling economy are grim.

Reuters

Residents remove debris at the site of an apartment building damaged by Russian missile and drone strikes, near Odesa, Ukraine, July 19, 2023.

“Iran didn’t have an alternative option, and could not afford not to support Russia, because Iran doesn’t have a lot of friends,” says Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group.

“Russia is the only country that has used its veto to shield Iran on the [United Nations] Security Council. It is the only country that has provided Iran with defensive technology in the past few years; it came to Iran’s rescue in Syria,” says Mr. Vaez. “Where I think Iran miscalculated is that ... they underestimated how visceral an issue [Ukraine] would be for the Europeans, and how it could backfire on Iran.”

Impact on nuclear diplomacy

The United States, which has so far provided tens of billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment to Ukraine, has described the Kremlin’s ties with Iran as an “unprecedented defense partnership” in a war where Russia has struggled both militarily and diplomatically.

Iran may have figured it had little to lose in Europe, where trade had evaporated. Europe lost credibility as well in Iranian eyes when it failed to fulfill promises to help Iran’s economy after President Donald Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018. Yet Iran’s support of Russia affects calculations in Washington, too.

“It has made [nuclear diplomacy] more difficult and politically costly,” adds Mr. Vaez, “because any deal in which Iran would financially benefit would be portrayed by the hard-liners in Washington as the Biden administration basically funding both sides in the war in Ukraine.”

The current cooperation with Moscow kicked off last August, when Iran delivered the first drones. Russia reportedly sent back a plane carrying $145 million in cash and three missiles for Iran to reverse-engineer: a Javelin and a Stinger, both American, and a British NLAW, all meant for Ukraine but intercepted by Russia.

The U.S. said in May that Russia had received 400 Iranian drones, though Ukraine puts the figure at 1,700. Iran state media reported in March that a deal had been finalized to purchase Russian Su-35 jet fighters.

“These are two states with many similar threat perceptions, and they find themselves good partners when it comes to helping each other on state security,” says Professor Abdolrasool-Farzam Divsallar, an Iran expert at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan.

EU Delegation in Vienna/Reuters

European and Iranian officials wait for the start of talks on reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, in Vienna, June 20, 2021.

The relationship is based on decision-makers from both sides who are part of a “military-industrial complex elite,” which in Iran includes Revolutionary Guard commanders, and defense and intelligence officials, who “for a long time see Russia as the only supporter of Iran’s defensive strategy, the only supporter of Iran’s procurement program,” says Professor Divsallar.

“The Russians delivered what they committed,” he says, despite Russia’s past history of delays. “They are consistent in supporting the core issue of the security of Iran.”

Decades of progress

Iran’s drone program began during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, as one tool in an asymmetric strategy to counter regional rivals far better equipped by the U.S. – and to counter the U.S. itself.

Iran’s program advanced as it captured and reverse-engineered top-line American drones used in Iraq and Afghanistan, including one RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone used by the CIA and brought down intact on Iranian soil in 2011 by the Revolutionary Guard.

Iran has shared its drone expertise with allied Shiite militias, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthis in Yemen. Until the Ukraine war, the peak example of Iranian drone capability came in September 2019, when a wave of strikes on oil processing facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia included 18 precise drone hits at Abqaiq.

Iran officially denies wartime drone transfers to Russia and professes neutrality. But Russia’s use of Iranian “drone power” in Ukraine has been a source of pride.

“A few years ago they [the West] would say the pictures of Iranian drones and missiles were photoshopped versions,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said last October. “Now, they say, ‘Iranian drones are very dangerous; why are you selling them to a certain country?’”

The hard-line Kayhan newspaper in February boasted about the “challenge” posed to the U.S. by exports of Iranian military equipment, and of drones especially, which it claimed “brought into question the entire post-World War II U.S. military dominance.”

Indeed, for Iran’s decision-makers, growing closer to Russia is a natural result of years of misdealings with the West. The final straw came when Mr. Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – which Iran had carefully abided by, until then – and reimposed sanctions.

Press service of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine in Sumy Region/Reuters

A residential building hit by a suicide drone, thought to be an Iranian-made Shahed fired by Russia, in Sumy, Ukraine, July 3, 2023.

Russia-Iran dealings have also been difficult: Moscow delayed completion for years in the 2000s of the Bushehr nuclear power reactor that it built for Iran, for example. And a long saga – including Moscow’s self-imposed, yearslong ban – accompanied Iran’s purchase of S-300 missile defense systems.

Moscow also supported U.N. sanctions against Iran in the lead-up to the 2015 nuclear deal. But that same year in Syria, as Iranian ground forces and their allied militias fought to preserve the embattled rule of President Bashar al-Assad, Russia deployed military forces that – working alongside Iran – ensured Mr. Assad’s victory.

Iran’s limits

Still, Iran appears to have drawn limits for itself. It reportedly sent Iranian trainers to Russian bases in Crimea and beyond to teach Russian officers the ways of its drones. But Iran has not transferred ballistic missiles, despite Russia’s own dwindling supply, and early reports of discussions on the issue.

And Iran’s semantics about neutrality suggest it is leaving the door open to U.S. incentives, as well as a desire to head off criticism at home for supporting the invasion of another country – just as Iran was devastatingly invaded by Iraq in 1980.

Indeed, shipping weapons to a country at war is a “very risky move,” especially when the receivers are “officially known to be the aggressor party,” the reformist newspaper Etemad warned last October.

“We suffered the same ourselves during the war with Iraq,” it said. “Iran must await consequences. ... With the strategic importance the West attaches to Ukraine, the issue will add yet another serious problem to our existing list of tensions.”

And Russia seems to have reached some limits, too. It infuriated Iran last week by supporting a joint statement with the Gulf Cooperation Council, issued after a GCC summit in Moscow, that appeared to question Iranian sovereignty over three Persian Gulf islands that are claimed by the United Arab Emirates.

“Much is made of Iran’s support being the ‘biggest’ support of Russia, but it could have been more,” says Professor Divsallar. “Iran was cautious about recognizing Ukrainian territory as part of Russia; it was cautious to give that green light ... and the Russians were upset about that.”

Iran has a host of territorial issues with neighbors that would make such recognition risky, notes Professor Divsallar.

“From the Russian viewpoint, the support [from Iran] is not full-fledged. From the Iranian viewpoint, it is the maximum they can deliver.”

Indeed, the International Crisis Group’s Mr. Vaez suggests that, if Iran’s support for Russia has complicated a return to a version of the nuclear deal, which would ease sanctions on Iran, Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from that deal has imposed a cost on the Ukraine war effort now so important to the U.S.

“I would argue that, if the JCPOA had been restored, and Iran had more to lose, then it would be much more reluctant to go as far as it has in supporting Russia in its war of aggression against Ukraine,” he says.

An Iranian researcher contributed to this report.

Bernat Armangue/AP

Spanish Prime Minister and socialist candidate Pedro Sánchez (right), left-wing Sumar prime minister candidate Yolanda Diaz (center), and Vox far-right party leader Santiago Abascal pose prior to a debate ahead of Spain's general election, in Madrid, July 19, 2023.

In Spain this past week, rising temperatures have been grabbing the headlines, and not just as a matter of meteorology.

Spain’s political temperature has been rising, too, ahead of a national election on Sunday that has implications for other divided and disaffected European democracies.

That’s because the Spanish election isn’t just about specific policy choices.

It could end up rupturing a political consensus that has buttressed Spain’s democracy since decades of dictatorship ended in 1977 by giving an extreme-right party a place in national government for the first time since General Francisco Franco’s rule.

And the rising fortunes of Spain’s small extreme right-wing Vox party – positioning it to win seats in a coalition government if the main center-right party outpolls the incumbent social democrats on Sunday – reflect a deeper shift in democracies elsewhere in Europe and worldwide.

It is grounded in the fading appeal of mainstream center-left and center-right political parties in the face of once-fringe politicians who use hot-button economic and social issues to tap into disenchantment with the leaders, institutions, and shared values that have long underpinned Western democracies.

That doesn’t mean Spain is about to pivot back to dictatorship. But the bitterly fought election has underscored how dramatically the rules of political engagement have been changing in 21st-century democracies. And it has highlighted the challenge facing those determined to turn back the tide of far-right populism.

That is the task that Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has set himself on Sunday.

Jon Nazca/Reuters

People walk past torn electoral posters of the Spanish presidential contenders ahead of Sunday's snap elections, in the town of Ronda, July 19, 2023.

He called the election five months earlier than expected, in the wake of a disastrous showing by his social-democratic PSOE in May local elections. The party lost some 1,500 councilors, while the center-right People’s Party gained 3,000, and Vox more than 1,000.

The PP reached power-sharing deals with Vox in a number of towns and cities. Mr. Sanchez is hoping to galvanize voter opposition to the prospect that Vox will take a similar back-door route into national government.

He also has a good economic story to tell. Spain’s economy grew by more than 4% in the first quarter of this year. Inflation is 2%, far lower than in many other European countries.

Still, the result remains hard to predict, not least because the debilitating heat wave could drive down turnout.

And Mr. Sanchez is far from assured of victory.

Neither his party nor the PP will win a parliamentary majority. But as opinion polls now stand, the center-right party is projected to win a narrow victory, and Vox will win the seats the PP would need to form a coalition government.

How big a shift?

How dramatically Spain might shift politically would depend on the degree to which the PP moved to accommodate Vox’s strident rejection of current policies on issues such as immigration, climate change, and LGBTQ+ rights.

But simply giving Vox a voice in government would break a long-standing taboo – against giving far-right groups a share of power  –among the center-right and center-left parties that have long dominated European politics. It would not be the first time. Elsewhere in Europe, far-right leaders are appealing successfully to voters’ economic insecurity, assertive nationalism, and resentment of immigrants and other minority groups.

That was a winning ticket last year for Giorgia Meloni, the far-right prime minister of Italy. And in both Sweden and Finland, center-right parties have recently done deals with extreme-right nationalist leaders so as to be able to form governments.

This month, the center-right prime minister of The Netherlands, Mark Rutte, resigned after his coalition partners balked at the toughened immigration policy that he had hoped would deflect pressure from the extremist Freedom Party.

Ms. Meloni has made no secret of her hope of seeing Vox join Spain’s next government, foreseeing an “hour of the patriots” in which the far-right agenda will gain sway within the 27-nation European Union.

She’ll be aware that, whatever the result of Spain’s election, any such shift will face headwinds from other EU countries determined to fend off any such rightward drift.

Yet the sort of scenario that the far-right inroads could ultimately lead to is on show in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu managed to assemble a parliamentary majority last year only by co-opting small far-right parties that mainstream politicians had previously shunned. They have prodded him into trying to gut the oversight role of Israel’s Supreme Court, seen as a bastion of liberalism.

But that effort has sparked months of street demonstrations by people young and old, on the left and the right, who say they are defending Israel’s democracy.

That is the kind of movement that Mr. Sanchez is trying to stir by calling the snap election. His future – and perhaps Spain’s – depends on whether he can revive enthusiastic grassroots support for the more centrist, inclusive kind of democracy that in Spain, and elsewhere in Europe, is increasingly under populist challenge.

Ilya Ponomarev’s life changed forever in March 2014, when he became the sole member of the Duma – Russia’s lower house of parliament – to vote “no” on the annexation of Crimea.

Russia’s takeover of the strategically significant peninsula from Ukraine, we now know, was just the opening act in President Vladimir Putin’s eventual full-blown invasion of Ukraine.

Today, Mr. Ponomarev, now in his late 40s and a Ukrainian citizen living in exile in Kyiv, is still fighting for Ukrainian independence. In the opening days of the war, he fought at the front, and he says he’s “still under active contract with the Ukrainian military.” He started an online TV channel operating from Kyiv that aims to counter Russian propaganda.

Mr. Ponomarev was also a key founder of something called the Congress of People’s Deputies – a kind of Russian parliament-in-exile composed of opposition leaders and other former Duma members. The 93-member body held its first meeting last November outside Warsaw.

The point is to prepare for a post-Putin Russia, and reform the federal government into a decentralized parliamentary democracy, Mr. Ponomarev told reporters Wednesday over coffee at the Monitor’s Washington bureau.

First question: Why is he in Washington?

“We’re trying right now, firstly, to establish a formal relationship between the congress and the different parliaments of the world. So we’re talking to members of Congress about this,” Mr. Ponomarev says, though when pressed, he won’t name names.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Ilya Ponomarev, deputy and member of the executive committee of the Congress of People's Deputies, a Russian parliament-in-exile, speaks with journalists at a coffee organized by the Monitor, July 19, 2023.

“It’s moving slowly, but still moving. And also, what we want very much to encourage people in Washington to do is to start a discussion about the postwar future of Europe, Russia, in general, how the war would end,” he says.

Mr. Ponomarev, who says he’s “no novice in this city,” is aware of the deep sensitivities around any discussion in Washington about “regime change” in Russia. People here are “extremely reluctant” to discuss this, he says, describing the Biden administration as “extremely cautious.”

In fact, he adds, “I don’t want any other countries to be involved in the regime change. I want this to be the cause for Russians to do.”

Still, he suggests the United States needs to be a bit less reactive in its approach to the war. The weapons supplies to Ukraine are “fantastic,” he says, expressing deep gratitude. “But at the same time, what’s the endgame? This is something that we want to encourage people to think about.”

Mr. Ponomarev, a onetime tech entrepreneur from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, also asserts that the post-Putin era may come sooner than many people think.

“Being inside Ukraine, I see a lot of signs that it’s a feasible option this year,” he says.

To the assembled reporters, this seems rather optimistic, given that Ukraine’s monthlong counteroffensive has only made incremental gains. Mr. Ponomarev acknowledges that his assertion might seem self-serving.

“Obviously there’s a certain political part of that statement,” he says. “We need to inspire people. We need to say that yes, it will happen tomorrow. But really, we are not years away. We are months away. Maybe it would be the end of this year, maybe it would be the beginning of next year, but I’m absolutely convinced that it would not be like 2025 or later.”

Mr. Ponomarev points to “Ukrainians entering Crimea” – which he clarifies to mean retaking control – as the sign that Mr. Putin is finished. “I will say [there’s] like 80% certainty in my mind that Ukraine would enter Crimea this year. And 80% certainty that if Ukraine is in Crimea, that political changes from Russia will start.”

“Crimea is what this war started from, it has sacred meaning,” Mr. Ponomarev says.

Following are more excerpts from our discussion, lightly edited for clarity:

The recent mutiny by Russian paramilitary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin gave the world a very different view of Mr. Putin. He’s no longer seen as the leader in iron-clad control. What does this tell us?

Putin is fundamentally changing his strategy of how he wants to be seen in the West. In the past, he wanted to be seen as the great macho guy, the alpha male. ... But right now, I think he wants to be seen as weak. He wants to be seen as a vulnerable person because he perfectly realizes that the main fear in [Washington] is that if he falls, it would be chaos – civil war, nuclear arms, Russia collapses.

He’s playing on this distinction between Ukraine not losing or Ukraine winning. ... And a significant part of the American establishment wants something like [the war] to be just settled down, we’ll return to business as usual, because the downside of Russia being defeated could be more dangerous than Putin winning in Ukraine.

You were critical of Ukraine’s 2014 revolution because you said it was dominated by nationalist and neoliberal forces. Part of Mr. Putin’s justification for this war is that Ukrainians are dangerous right-wing nationalists, and many Ukrainians are very sensitive about this characterization. How significant is this nationalist presence in Ukraine today, and how big a threat do you consider it to be?

I was never critical of the revolution. To me, I was stating the obvious, that it was dominated by right-wing forces, nationalist forces. ... [Today] at the front, those people are the core of the resistance. They are the most devoted patriots, and there is a major shift in the position of the society towards this pretty radical nationalist position. Emotionally, it’s fully understandable. Do I think it would be sustainable, [that] there would be some radical nationalist coming to power? No, I don’t think so. In 2014 parliamentary elections, pretty much all the radical nationalist movements failed. In general, it’s the lack of the left that is the problem.

Why do you believe Ukraine will retake Crimea? The counteroffensive is going very slowly.

We will make this offensive successful because just simply the Ukrainian army is way better organized. ... It has the spirit, and the Russian army just simply doesn’t know what it’s fighting for. Just be patient; everything will happen.

You are meeting with parliamentarians around the world as you seek to build support for a democratic parliamentary government in Russia. Are you meeting with members of Congress [in Washington]?

Congress, that is [who] is meeting with us without hiding. The executive office right now is very shy of announcing this. We are planning most likely in the fall a large event on the Hill, but let them speak first.

Are you heading back to Kyiv next?

Firstly, I go to Japan. They have a lot of interest. What our congress is doing generates a lot of interest there.

AP

The main green of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., in 2009.

In last month’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling against race-conscious college admissions, justices on both sides also took a swipe at preferences given to the relatives of school alumni. These legacy admissions, wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch, “undoubtedly benefit white and wealthy applicants the most.” Meanwhile, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said they help “disfavor underrepresented racial minorities.” Soon after, President Joe Biden asked the Education Department to investigate “practices like legacy admissions ... that expand privilege instead of opportunity.”

Then on Wednesday, just weeks after the ruling, two prominent schools – Wesleyan University in Connecticut and the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus – announced they would end preferences based on bloodlines. Their actions hint at similar moves to come among schools – mainly elite private ones in the East – that still rely on the gene pool as much as the talent pool to select entrants.

An applicant’s connections to alumni “indicates little about that applicant’s ability to succeed at the University,” said Wesleyan President Michael Roth in a statement. If other schools take similar steps, he told The Boston Globe, “we have a better chance of restoring some of the trust and confidence [in higher education] we’ve lost from the public here in the United States.”

At the University of Minnesota, the director of student government and legislative affairs, Carter Yost, told Minnesota Public Radio, “It’s a democratic society, and we try and avoid nepotism to the extent that we can.” Legacy admissions, he added, were an “unfair leg-up, that had nothing to do with merit, or someone’s experiences.”

In recent years, a few dozen schools have taken this step, long before the court ruling, such as Johns Hopkins University and Amherst College. Some states ban the practice in government-supported universities. “You win a privilege lottery from birth,” Massachusetts state Sen. Lydia Edwards, a sponsor for a bill that would outlaw legacy admissions in that state, told the Globe. “That is insulting for those of us who are first-generation students trying to get into college.”

In any organization, nepotistic privilege and other family-related favoritism are often a way to pass down power by lineage. Such practices, even by appearance, demote merit and integrity as qualifications. “Power is never a good, unless he be good that has it,” said King Alfred the Great. And he might have added, one’s future in higher education should not depend on one’s genetic heritage but on one’s unique ability to excel in learning.