Why Khamenei’s killing hit Putin where it hurts

The last time the United States and Israel bombed Iran, a reporter asked Vladimir Putin how he’d respond if Iran’s supreme leader were killed in the attack.

“I don’t even want to discuss it,” the Russian president replied.

Less than nine months later, after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei died in an Israeli-led, U.S.-backed targeted strike on Saturday, Putin had little choice but to respond.

The assassination will have triggered two of Putin’s deepest instincts: deep-rooted paranoia about his own longevity, and a drive for political survival defined by victory over Ukraine — whatever the cost.

Both were on display in a short statement posted on the Kremlin’s website, in which Putin denounced the killing of Khamenei as “murder … committed in cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law.”

It was a stronger reaction than that after the capture earlier this year of another erstwhile Russian ally, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.

And yet Putin, notably, did not name the countries behind the killing.

Bunker mentality 

In Russian circles, the death of Khamenei evoked comparisons with another dictator’s downfall. 

Footage, filmed on a mobile phone, of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi being beaten to death following a 2011 NATO-led intervention left Putin “apoplectic,” according to the well-connected Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar. 

“They showed the entire world how he was killed, covered in blood,” Putin, visibly angry, said during a televised press conference at the time. “Is that democracy?”

In May 2012, not long after Gaddafi’s overthrow, Putin returned to the presidency after a stint as prime minister. He took to the job on an apparent mission to break with the West and root out domestic dissent, which he accused of seeking to work with Russia’s enemies to achieve regime change. 

“It was precisely Gaddafi’s death that became a turning point in Russian politics — both foreign and domestic,” writes Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center based in Berlin.

That the U.S. and Europe would allow a global leader to be overthrown so brutally was seen by Putin, a former KGB agent, as “the height of treachery,” Baunov said.

With the passing of years, Putin has sunk into increasing isolation.

During the Covid pandemic, foreign dignitaries and Russian officials alike were required to stay several meters away from the Russian president. Interactions with the public were, and still are, carefully choreographed. 

Russia’s late opposition leader Alexei Navalny famously dubbed him a “grandad in a bunker,” a nod to his team’s investigation into a lavish palace allegedly owned by Putin that included a network of tunnels dug 50 meters into the ground. 

‘They’re going to kill us’

Recent events will only have deepened Putin’s paranoia. 

The toppling of two Russian allies — Maduro and Khamenei — in rapid succession prompted some pro-Kremlin commentators to break what has been an informal rule since Donald Trump’s return to the White House: Avoid openly criticizing the U.S. or its president.

Leading the charge, Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev wrote that the U.S. attack on Iran had revealed Trump’s “true colors.” 

The Russian television presenter and propagandist Vladimir Solovyov accused the U.S. of behaving “like a predator,” using diplomacy to lure “its prey into lowering its guard before sinking its teeth into its throat.”

“Do we understand that the conversation about Iran is also a conversation about Russia?” he asked his viewers.

Alexander Dugin, a pro-war, ultranationalist thinker, warned that Washington could be planning to do the same to Russia. 

“One by one, our allies are being systematically eliminated,” he wrote. “It’s clear who’s next, and it’s clear what negotiations with such an enemy really mean,” he continued, referring to ongoing U.S.-brokered peace talks with Ukraine. 

The pro-Kremlin outlet Segodnya.ru laid it out bluntly, with an opinion piece titled: “How they’re going to kill us.” 

Eye on the prize

The Kremlin, by contrast, has struck a much more diplomatic tone.

A day after Putin denounced Khamenei’s killing, his spokesperson Dmitry Peskov expressed “deep disappointment” that U.S. talks with Iran had failed, while also voicing “deep appreciation” for U.S. efforts to broker peace with Ukraine. 

But, he added, “first and foremost, we trust only ourselves and we defend our own interests.”

The message was clear: Putin is not going to let his feelings about Iran get in the way of his goals in Ukraine. 

“His greatest weapon in that conflict has been the willingness and the ability of the Trump administration to put pressure on the Ukrainians and on the Europeans,” said Sam Greene, a professor in Russian politics at King’s College London. “And so there is absolutely no reason for him to give up that weapon.”

Whatever the Russian president may personally feel, his actions show him to be a pragmatist. “Putin is not going to risk his personal security, the security of his regime or his vision of Russian national security to stick his neck out to help the Iranians, the North Koreans, the Chinese or anybody else,” Greene said. 

For Moscow, the Iran crisis has various upsides, among them the prospect of higher oil prices, discord between Europe and the U.S. in how to deal with the fallout, and a Washington distracted from the war in Ukraine.  

Trump’s actions also help reinforce his domestic and international narrative about the perils of Western hegemony.

Moreover, Putin has a deterrent that neither Gaddafi nor Khamenei enjoyed: the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. 

But nuclear weapons offer no protection against threats from within. If the fall of allied strongmen sharpens Putin’s fears, they are likely to center less on NATO missiles than on palace intrigue.

The Russian president knows as well as anybody that dictators who amass as much power and for as long as Putin has, tend to leave office in one of two ways, said Greene. 

“Either under arrest or in a box.”