Hezbollah members hold flags marking Resistance and Liberation Day, in Kfar Kila near the border with Israel, southern Lebanon, May 25, 2021. Reuters/Aziz Taher

As western powers have ratcheted up financial, diplomatic and military pressure on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah have been presenting Moscow’s action as a pertinent warning to those moderate Arab states willing to align with Israel and the US.

“The pro-West factions in Lebanon and Arab countries that have normalized ties with the Zionist regime should consider the fate of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and learn lessons from developments in Ukraine,” Sheikh Nabil Qaouk, a member and deputy head of the executive council of Hezbollah, said in remarks on Sunday quoted by official Iranian media outlets.

Pro-western parties in Lebanon, which holds a general election on May 15, would be abandoned by the US just as Ukraine had been, he claimed.

“The United States tends to provoke its allies to engage in a conflict and then leaves them alone to handle the matter,” he said.

Qaouk added: “Our best advice to these elements before the upcoming parliamentary polls is that they should not give in to temptations of the Great Satan [the US]. Our national duty in the forthcoming elections is to choose the liberation of Lebanon from the shackles of American guardianship and Saudi-crafted initiatives as a high priority.”

A number of Iranian regime-aligned outlets have published commentaries praising Russia’s military action in Ukraine. One editorial in Al Khanadeq, a pro-Hezbollah news site, claimed that Ukraine had invited Russian aggression after allegedly breaking the 2015 Minsk Agreement that sought to end the fighting in the Donbas region.

Ukraine had “threatened Russia’s national security” and was subjecting Russian speakers in the Donbas region to an “extermination” campaign, it alleged, saying these factors meant that Russian President Vladimir Putin had no choice about exercising the military option.

“The Russian military operation aims to be the final blow to a world order based on old rules … [It will] create new relations, influence, policies, international laws,” argued the editorial, according to a translation by Resistance Axis Monitor, an independent research organization focused on Iran.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, meanwhile, stepped back from a full-throated endorsement of the Russian invasion while expressing sympathy for Moscow’s stance.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran understands [Russian] security concerns arising from several decades of NATO’s expansionism,” Raisi said on Monday.

Separately, a senior Iranian general stated that the lesson of the Ukraine war for Tehran was never to abandon a nuclear deterrent.

“Ukrainians are now grappling with a crisis because they dismantled their deterrent capability,”  said Brig-Gen. Aziz Nasirzadeh in an interview on Monday with the Tasnim news agency.

In 1994, three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the independent state of Ukraine acceded to the international nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), removing Soviet-era nuclear weapons from its territory.