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The US rejected an offer from Russia earlier this month to stop sharing targeting data with Iran if Washington agreed to end its intelligence partnership with Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Kirill Dmitriev, a special envoy for President Vladimir Putin, conveyed the offer at a meeting in Miami last week with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who have led US efforts to broker an end to the war in Ukraine, the people said.
The Russian offer was first reported by Politico.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the offer. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Dmitriev posted on X that the report was “fake” and warned of what he called a “massive fake media campaign to undermine progress” in rebuilding the US’s ties with Russia.
Russia’s offer was the latest in a series of proposals Putin has made to mediate in the US-Israeli war with Iran, which is now in its third week.
In a call with US President Donald Trump last week, Putin made a series of suggestions to help end the war with Iran, which the Kremlin said also had the backing of Gulf states.
Those ideas included a proposal to move Iran’s enriched uranium to Russia, which Trump also rejected, according to one person familiar with the issue and the news website Axios. The US and Israel have said Tehran could use the uranium to manufacture nuclear weapons.
As the war drags on, Putin is eager to offer Trump an ostensible win on Iran, in part to keep the US from swinging behind Ukraine as it continues to fight back against Russia’s four-year invasion, one of the people familiar with the matter said.
“Trump understands that the options for him to come out in a positive manner in Iran are narrowing. And so the idea is that if he gets desperate enough, there’s an interest in Russia in making Trump look good,” the person said.
But the offer “appears somewhat like an afterthought, possibly intended more as signalling or provocation than as a serious proposal”, said Nicole Grajewski, a professor at Sciences Po university in Paris who studies the Russia-Iran relationship.
“More broadly, it [Russia’s help for Iran] is not remotely comparable to the scale or depth of US intelligence support to Ukraine, which makes the comparison somewhat unconvincing. And it would be a bad deal if the US agreed to it,” she said.
Russia has kept criticism of the war with Iran, one of Moscow’s major allies, to a minimum even as it has shared intelligence on the location of US military assets in the region, including planes and warships, with Tehran.
Trump and other US officials have avoided confirming that Russia is helping Iran, but they insist that any such help has given Iran’s forces no operational benefits.
Russia has nonetheless emerged as one of the Iran war’s clear beneficiaries after sharply increased oil prices gave it a boost to its budget worth as much as $150mn a day. The US has also relaxed sanctions against Russia’s oil exports in the hope of easing pressure on energy markets.
The Iran war has also sidelined trilateral negotiations between the US, Russia and Ukraine over ending the war in Ukraine.
Kyiv’s negotiation team will meet the US team on Saturday to discuss a possible resumption of the talks as well as Washington’s decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters on Friday.
Additional reporting by Amy Mackinnon in Washington and Fabrice Deprez in Kyiv