Nicole, do you see this as messaging? And do you feel like Alex is saying that the United States and the West are behind this?

I mean, it's unclear who is beyond the Ukrainians, if there's any other actors kind of pushing for these kind of strikes.

But what did seem evident from this and actually from some of the Ukrainian intelligence leakages from this war is that they're really trying to show how involved the Russians have been in Iranian activity.

targeting or an Iranian military action and how the Russians are really facilitating or at least supporting a lot of what we see as some of the more escalatory parts on behalf of Iran.

You know, these ships in the Caspian have been targeted before from the Ukrainians.

It wasn't clear if the previous shipments, it was about a year ago, if that was about military shipments.

But with this, I think that the clear purpose of it from the Ukrainian side was to really highlight how involved both Russia and Iran are in their kind of respective wars and how they both are kind of parties to these two different organizations.

Nicole, what do you think about the potential for Ukraine possibly being viewed as a proxy?

I mean, listen, Russia and Iran have a long history of unifying around certain kind of geopolitical issues and intelligence sharing, working together.

Yeah, I mean, the basis for this, um, we saw actually in the very first stages of the war where, um, there was accusations that Russia was potentially supporting Iran's targeting of American troops.

And since then, there's been reporting from the German publication Stern that actually showed that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service had a station in Tehran that has been transmitting a lot of data from satellites to the Iranians.

Additionally, there are some kind of evidence, I would say, that the Russians have helped Iran in terms of their UAV or drone performance.

Um, and that's partly through lessons that, uh, the Russians have learned from Ukraine.

So there's a quite a bit of basis, I would say, to the Ukrainian claims.

Putin has had a long-standing relationship with, with Trump, and Trump has praised Putin historically.

I mean, it, within Russia, there's many sides of this government.

And so I wonder, what do you think from Russia's perspective was different about 2025 to the types of support it was willing to provide in 2026? And how now Russia is viewing this relationship with Iran amid this ongoing conflict with the United States?

Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question.

And it's something that I think is really important to understand the relationship and also how Russia thinks about crises.

I mean, the June 2025 war was very different than the ongoing war between the U.S., Iran and Israel.

It was 12 days.

It was a pretty short and comparatively limited war.

And so when you think about what Russia could have done, I mean, there's not a lot to do under that kind of compressed timescale.

And so I want maybe starting with you, like, what do you think are some of the, I would say, most dangerous misconceptions that still exist about Russia and how it approaches these partnerships? Yeah, I