How Moscow's commentators frame the US–Iran confrontation matters for the region, and one of the clearest recent statements of the Russian view comes from the daily Kommersant. Writing there, Farhad Ibrahimov, an expert at the Financial University under the Russian Government and a lecturer at the People's Friendship University, argues that the war has entered a phase that is neither peace nor war.
His first target is Donald Trump's messaging. The US president told Al Jazeera that Washington is in no hurry to negotiate, told Glenn Beck's programme that the war would end soon, and posted on Truth Social that the navy had cleared the mines from the Strait of Hormuz — the same announcement he had already made on 18 August. Ibrahimov reads the contradictions as evidence of a missing plan rather than of an approaching settlement.
In Tehran, he argues, the security bloc has drawn its own conclusion. Around the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, IRGC veterans and intelligence figures are gaining ground, and recent appointments came with calls for maximum deterrence and readiness for offensive operations. The military vertical is being adapted to a long confrontation, not dismantled.
The precedent argument follows. Washington has crossed the line between threatening a strike on Iran and carrying one out, and the next administration inherits that option. A further attack could come after the November midterms, or later.
Attrition, in this reading, cuts both ways. The United States has tactical results without a strategic victory: no Iranian capitulation, continued risk in Hormuz, falling domestic support, and heavy consumption of interceptors — by July, roughly 65 percent of Patriot stocks and at least 38 percent of THAAD, on the figures Ibrahimov cites. He notes that IRGC adviser Mohammad Reza Naghdi has floated stretching the war until Trump leaves office.
Against that sits Iran's economy, and President Masoud Pezeshkian's case, made on 21 August, for ending the war now while Tehran still negotiates from strength: a rial near two million to the dollar, 66 percent annual inflation in July, food prices up 128 percent, and a new US sanctions package covering some 60 individuals, companies and vessels.
Naval rotation supplies the closing evidence. The George Washington group has replaced the Abraham Lincoln, the Theodore Roosevelt is deploying, and the George H.W. Bush remains on station — a posture built to resume strikes, not to leave.