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Mar 29, 2026
Headline: Putin’s Post-Iran Paranoia
Sub-headline: The Russian president has curtailed his schedule, and Moscow has virtually no cell service. The official explanation is about Ukrainian drones, but Putin is clearly spooked by the attacks on his old ally.
Trump’s war on Iran is having all kinds of unexpected ripple effects: In London, an Iran-linked group has taken responsibility for torching four Jewish charity ambulances, and two men were arrested for spying on the city’s Jewish community. The war has choked off the global supplies of helium, much of which is made in Qatar and is a critical component in manufacturing A.I. chips. Oil prices have gone haywire. (Okay, just kidding, all of that was totally predictable.) Meanwhile, in Russia, a different sort of political psychosis has taken hold.
Vladimir Putin is, according to the chatter, completely spooked by the U.S.-Israeli war against Russia’s old ally, particularly the reports that Israel targeted the ayatollah by hacking traffic cameras in Tehran. Earlier this month, the Russian president stopped going to the Kremlin and all his public events vanished from the calendar. Now, Moscow has virtually no cell service and it’s become impossible to message, call, or surf the web in large parts of the city. Even V.P.N.s have been affected: One friend told me he needed to try three different services to see the videos I was sending him.
The Kremlin has experimented with shutting off cell service in other, smaller cities, but to do this in the nation’s capital—a city of 13 million people, where so many of the country’s businesses are headquartered—is shocking. The official explanation is that Moscow is protecting itself from Ukrainian drones, but even pro-Kremlin propagandists are speculating that this has more to do with the war in Iran than the one in Ukraine. (One rumor, via the right-wing Tsargrad TV network, posits that the new ayatollah, Mojtaba Khamenei, is in Moscow for medical treatment after being wounded in an Israeli attack, though the Iranian government has denied this.)
Regardless, it’s clear that Putin—who has taken extreme measures to protect himself from everything from Covid infection to political assassination—is very concerned about his personal safety. The public and quite humiliating 2011 death of Muammar Qaddafi, another ally, made a huge impression on Putin, who is said to have repeatedly watched the footage of his final hours; in many ways, that event marked the beginning of his hard-right, revanchist turn. Now, Putin’s already sky-high paranoia appears to be kicking into still-higher gear.
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Julia Ioffe is a founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck News. Previously, Ioffe was a US politics, national security, and foreign policy reporter for The Atlantic. Prior to 2017, she was a contributing writer at Politico magazine, where she covered the 2016 election, a contributor at Huffington Post’s Highline, and a columnist at Foreign Policy. She was a senior editor at The New Republic from 2012 to 2014, and a Moscow-based correspondent for Foreign Policy and the New Yorker. Ioffe has twice been a finalist for the Livingston Award : for a 2013 profile of Senator Rand Paul and a 2011 piece on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. In 2009, she received a Fulbright scholarship to live and work in Russia
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