By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
President Vladimir Putin has held three telephone calls with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this year so far. What matters most now, after the third of these calls on July 28, is that Putin has omitted to put on the Kremlin record what he told Netanyahu – and what Netanyahu has just relayed to President Donald Trump that is Putin’s warning to them both.
If the latest press leaks, calculated in Iran and possibly in India too, are correct, then Putin has crossed a warfighting threshold he has refused to cross before.
In Putin’s first telephone call to Netanyahu on May 6, the Russian communiqué reports an exchange of greetings for the Victory Day celebration and the “determination of both countries in defending the truth about the Second World War, as well as in countering any attempts to revise its outcomes or falsify history.” Logged for the record was a discussion on “various aspects of the situation in the Middle East and some pressing bilateral matters”. Omitted from the record was mention of the truth and history of the Israeli genocide against the Palestinian state and its people; the Israeli invasions of Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria; and Israeli arms deliveries to the Ukraine for war against Russia.
In the second call on June 13, the communiqué combined Putin’s call to Netanyahu with his call to Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian. It is clear Putin gave Pezeshkian his “condolences to the authorities and citizens of Iran over the heavy death toll resulting from Israeli strikes, including among civilians”, and his emphasis that “Russia condemned Israel’s actions.” It is not clear Putin said the same thing to Netanyahu. Instead, the communiqué says Putin “emphasised the importance of resuming the negotiations and resolving any issues pertaining to Iran’s nuclear programme exclusively via political and diplomatic means.”
Omitted from this record was something Putin admitted at a press conference several days later, on June 18. That is when he admitted asking Netanyahu that while the Israeli Air Force (IAF) was attacking Iranian targets around the country, it should refrain from hitting the Bushehr nuclear reactor and the two hundred Russians working there. Putin acknowledged “we have agreed with the leadership of Israel which will ensure their security.”
In the third telephone call, reported by the Kremlin in the afternoon of July 28, Putin said he spoke of Syria and Iran. About the latter he said he had offered “to facilitate in every possible way the search for negotiated solutions to the Iran’s nuclear issue.” Omitted was any mention by Putin of Israel’s campaign of starvation in Gaza, which Israel’s allies — including US President Donald Trump on the same day — have publicly acknowledged and condemned.
Also omitted by Putin was any mention of the visit to Kiev last week of Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar. He confirmed to Vladimir Zelensky “Israel’s solidarity with Ukraine”, and the “importance of tightening bilateral relations between our nations.” Those relations, Putin understands, include deliveries of Israeli arms to attack Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield.
Source: https://x.com/gidonsaar/status/1947955817098944615, 12:43 pm.
Source: https://x.com/gidonsaar/status/1948039758740914521, 6:17 pm.
Netanyahu also omitted to record what was said in this call for more than a day, a delay that was noted by the Israeli press. He then issued a tweet saying only that “the conversation between the two leaders was on the issue of Iran.”
The brevity is telling. It has triggered speculation among Moscow sources that Putin called Netanyahu to warn that recent Iranian press leaks of the operational testing and deployment of the S-400 air defence system in Iran are correct; that Putin has ordered several hundred Russians to man and train the Iranians to operate the system; and that they have orders to fire against any Israeli or US target which comes within the 400-kilometre range.
“That would be a reply to Trump about the super-invisibility of his best-in-the-world B-2 bombers,” one Moscow source commented. “Will he risk bombing Iran again, as he’s been threatening?”
The Russian sources agree that if Putin has decided to deter fresh Israeli and American attacks on Iran, and if he has lifted his longstanding no-fire order against the Israeli Air Force in Syria, this is a major change in Russian policy on the southern front.
So far, no Russian military blogger or mainstream news platform in Moscow has reported the published Iranian claims. US bloggers have expressed scepticism, but they have misspelled the original Iranian source and misinterpreted what was announced. A military source adds: “So far, I have not seen an official or unofficial refutation of the [Iranian] report. I’ve also seen nothing that leads me to believe it’s not valid.”
Initial public reports of the delivery of the S-400 to Iran commenced a year ago; the history of the S-400 operational deployment goes back to 2007.
Source: https://www.iranintl.com/en/202411171565According to this source, an anti-regime publication based in the UK and Saudi Arabia, “ 'Our current systems offer far superior capabilities compared to the S-400,’ said Davood Sheikhian, deputy for operations of the IRGC Aerospace Force, in a video interview shared by state-controlled media. He added that Iran is also actively using the Russian-made S-300 system and sees no need for the S-400.” That was said seven months before Israel and the US launched their war.
Anti-Russian reports have claimed the S-400 has failed to perform effectively in the recent India-Pakistan war, in Syria, and in the Ukraine; and that the Turkish S-400 deployment has been withdrawn. These claims have not been corroborated.
In the breaking news over the past four days, operational testing of the S-400 at a site near Isfahan has been reported, following evidence of several military transport flights from Russia to Iran since the ceasefire between Israel, the US, and Iran came into effect on June 24. Click to follow these developments.
Here is the original Iranian report which appeared on the site bitrun.info, dated July 26. Note the English spelling of the site name. Subsequent pick-up by military news aggregators in Belgium, South Korea, Malaysia and the US can be traced to the single bitrun.info origin which they have repeatedly misspelled as birun, failing to verify the report itself.
Source: https://bitrun.info/1404/05/%D8%A7%D8%B3-%DB%B4%DB%B0%DB%B0/
The originating bitrun.info report claims that “according to a report published by BRICS News, Iran recently received the advanced S-400 air defense system and today conducted its first operational test in areas around Isfahan.” The BRICS News reference is an Instagram platform apparently publishing media materials from BRICS members, including Iran. This source report is much briefer than the bitrun.info publication.
Source: https://www.instagram.com/brics_countries/p/DMkclxFNgAY/ -- dated July 26, 2025
First pickup of the Iranian S-400 story came from a military news aggregator in Belgium on July 27:
The Military Watch Magazine site, published in Seoul, South Korea, also reported the news on July 27, but with a caveat: “With no details on any deliveries of foreign systems to Iran having been confirmed, a significant possibility remains that there is little substance to reports of either Chinese systems or S-400s being delivered to the country.”
Military Watch Magazine has been published in South Korea since 2017. It reports itself as having “no sources of external funding and no affiliation to any state, party, movement or political ideology.” https://militarywatchmagazine.com/about_us
The Malaysian aggregator, Defence Security Asia, repeated the bitrun.info report on July 28.
Source: https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/iran-operational-test-s400-isfahan/
On July 29, Hook Global, an Indian media outlet based in New Delhi, began running this 7-minute report of the S-400 test at Isfahan (see lead images). This publication has gone further than the Iranian reports because it has added information from “regional open-source intelligence platforms”. These reportedly had detected “unusual electromagnetic emissions consistent with the S-400 radar profiles” as well as “transport signatures matching the S-400 components”. Indian military experts are also cited in this report.
By contrast, the initial bitrun.info report claimed no more than that “explosions were reported in the vicinity of Isfahan, which, according to informed sources, were caused by the test activities of the said defence system.”
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF03QEAQo70
This is a breaking news development. For follow-up discussion with Nima Alkhorshid, click to listen from 5:30 pm Moscow time, 10:30 am Washington, DC, time.
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