Iran's supreme leader asks Putin to do more after US strikes
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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Here's what Goldman's team estimates: "If oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz were to drop by 50% for one month and then were to remain down 10% for another 11 months, we estimate that Brent would briefly jump to a peak of around $110." Read more here on Goldman's scenarios. Gold pushed higher with the world in limbo as the US joined Israel's attack on Iran over the weekend. No formal response has been issued by Iran, with wider fallout expected. Spot gold climbed 0.2% to $3,375.04 an ounce taking it to within $125 of its record high as investors sought safe-haven assets in a tumultuous economic situation. Gold then sank 0.5% despite broader haven demand. Bloomberg reports: Read more here. Wall Street is closely watching escalating tensions in the Middle East after President Trump confirmed that the US launched a surprise strike on Iran's nuclear sites late Saturday, marking the country's official entry into the two-week-old conflict. Markets have held mostly steady in the aftermath of the escalation, although US stock futures fell across the board when trading opened Sunday evening. Additionally, bitcoin (BTC-USD) prices, often viewed as a barometer of risk appetite, dropped over 1.6% to trade around $100,500 a coin. WTI crude (CL=F) and Brent (BZ=F) futures jumped, trading near $76 and $79 a barrel, respectively, as uncertainty looms over the potential closure of the critical Strait of Hormuz despite ongoing threats from Iran. The latest surge follows oil's third consecutive week of gains on Friday. "We wouldn't be surprised to see this spark a risk-off reaction in US equities and will be watching the futures closely on Sunday evening and Monday morning," Lori Calvasina, head of US equity strategy research at RBC Capital Markets, wrote in a Sunday evening note to clients. 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