Thus far, Iraq’s rapid unraveling has not been a major concern for Moscow. The situation in the country rarely features prominently in Russian news reporting — where Ukraine and Russian domestic matters dominate — and does not appear to be a top priority for senior Russian officials, though Russian President Vladimir Putin did recently express “full support” for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s efforts to combat militants driving the Iraqi military from cities and towns in northern and western Iraq. Notwithstanding some important interests in Iraq and the Middle East, Russia’s government is unlikely to get too involved there.

Broadly speaking, as Fyodor Lukyanov has written in Al-Monitor, developments in Iraq have served primarily to confirm pre-existing views in Russia. This has multiple components. First, with respect to the United States, the new crisis has been an I-told-you-so moment — demonstrated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s reminder of Moscow’s frequent assertions at the time of the US invasion that “the adventurism the Americans and the British started there would not end well.” This has been a regular refrain for Russian officials and commentators during every reversal since 2003.

Second, the new crisis in Iraq aligns with Moscow’s view that it was a mistake for the United States to prolong Syria’s civil war by aiding Syria’s rebels, however weakly, rather than supporting or at least tolerating Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s efforts to crush the Islamist groups trying to oust his regime and now Iraq’s, too. Here, Russia’s complaints focus not only on the United States and other Western nations, however; Syria’s spillover into Iraq reinforces the widespread Russian sense that in acting as patrons of Sunni Islamist militants in Syria and elsewhere, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are up to no good.

What the Kremlin is actually prepared to do about the instability in Iraq is less clear. Russia certainly favors stability in Iraq over chaos and prefers Maliki to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS); perhaps ironically, Russia has won a more significant role in Iraq’s oil sector than many Russian officials likely expected a decade ago, including in the huge West Qurna-2 oil field. Nevertheless, it bears remembering that for all Putin’s and Lavrov’s criticism of the George W. Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq, Russia did not make it a major issue in US-Russia relations at the time. More important, Russia did not create problems for the United States in Iraq during the invasion or the long US occupation of the country.