By Parisa Hafezi and Guy Faulconbridge
ISTANBUL/MOSCOW (Reuters) -Iran’s supreme leader sent his foreign minister to Moscow on Monday to ask President Vladimir Putin for more help from Russia after the biggest U.S. military action against the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution over the weekend.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Israel have publicly speculated about killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and about regime change, a step Russia fears could sink the Middle East into the abyss.
While Putin has condemned the Israeli strikes, he has yet to comment on the U.S. attacks on Iranian nuclear sites though he last week called for calm and offered Moscow’s services as a mediator over the nuclear programme.
A senior source told Reuters that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi was due to deliver a letter from Khamenei to Putin, seeking the latter’s support.
Iran has not been impressed with Russia’s support so far, Iranian sources told Reuters, and the country wants Putin to do more to back it against Israel and the United States. The sources did not elaborate on what assistance Tehran wanted.
The Kremlin said that Putin would receive Araqchi but did not say what would be discussed.
Araqchi was quoted by the state TASS news agency as saying that Iran and Russia were coordinating their positions on the current escalation in the Middle East.
Putin has repeatedly offered to mediate between the United States and Iran, and said that he had conveyed Moscow’s ideas on resolving the conflict to them while ensuring Iran’s continued access to civil nuclear energy.
The Kremlin chief last week refused to discuss the possibility that Israel and the United States would kill Khamenei.
Putin said that Israel had given Moscow assurances that Russian specialists helping to build two more reactors at the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran would not be hurt in air strikes.
Russia, a longstanding ally of Tehran, plays a role in Iran’s nuclear negotiations with the West as a veto-wielding U.N. Security Council member and a signatory to an earlier nuclear deal Trump abandoned during his first term in 2018.
But Putin, whose army is fighting a major war of attrition in Ukraine for the fourth year, has so far shown little appetite in public for diving into a confrontation with the United States over Iran just as Trump seeks to repair ties with Moscow.
(Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols at the United Nations; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
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