Paper abstract:

Iran stressed an East-oriented policy since the 2000s, an essential part of which has been relations with Russia pursued more actively, especially between 2005 and 2012 in declarative and operational policies. However, the cardinal issue associated with these relations is that despite the East-oriented attitude of Iran's foreign policy during that period, the political relations were practically limited and this was followed by a decline in bilateral economic exchanges where the impact of international sanctions - UN Security Council-enacted sanctions with the participation of Western and Eastern countries - was of great significance in this regard. Therefore, the question arises as to how and to what extent the international sanctions affected the decline in Tehran-Moscow relations in the era of Eastern policies? The core idea of this article is that "the decline in the two countries' bilateral relations is mainly affected by the international sanctions, and these sanctions have drastically alleviated their bilateral relations challenging Iran's East-oriented policy due to Russia's adherence to the international security and normative regimes arising from international arrangements, as well as Russia's affirmative vote to UN Security Council's resolutions on embargos against Iran on one hand, and their binding nature on the other hand." This article employs a method of correlation of variables to show the association between the sanctions and the two countries' relations, and a qualitative method of analyzing data available in libraries and websites alongside the experts' viewpoints is acquired to analyze Russia's reasons to join the UN resolutions on sanctions against Iran.