Trump Humiliated as Putin Dishes Out ‘Russian Payback’

Kevin Lamarque / REUTERS Vladimir Putin appears to have betrayed President Donald Trump’s trust by allowing Russian spy satellites to feed Iran the intelligence provided to strike U.S. forces.

CNN reported that Cosmos 2573, one of Russia’s elite spy satellites, was part of a constellation of at least 14 Russian spacecraft tracked flying over Prince Sultan Air Base near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, just two days before a major Iranian attack there.

Two U.S. officials told CNN they have evidence the satellites fed intelligence back to Iran that aided at least some of its precision strikes.

The March 27 attack on the base wounded 12 U.S. personnel and destroyed an AWACS aircraft, America’s airborne radar and command plane in the Middle East, after Iran apparently tracked it to a location outside its usual parking spot.

“The scale of the damage to the base and the accuracy of the strikes would have been nearly impossible without Russian geospatial intelligence,” sources told CNN.

The attacks come after the Russian president personally assured Trump that Russia wasn’t helping Tehran, and Trump said, “I think I trust them.” Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi political scientist and senior research fellow at King’s College London’s Department of War Studies, put it more bluntly.

“We wouldn’t be in this situation today.

The war wouldn’t be where it is today if it wasn’t for this unique capability that the Russians gave to the Iranians,” he told CNN.

Obaid argued Russia’s motive was retaliation for U.S. intelligence-sharing with Ukraine.

“You have to see it in this way.

This is Russian payback with interest,” he said.

“It’s monumental in terms of the consequences of what this has done, not just to the U.S. standing in the region, but to the security architecture of the region going forward.” Sources broadly suspect Russian satellites gave Iran targeting information multiple times over the course of the war, including in a strike on a CIA facility in the Saudi capital, though officials remain divided on just how consequential that support has been.

The Kremlin has dismissed the reporting as “fake news.” The revelations land awkwardly for Trump, who told reporters at the White House in late July that he trusted both Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping not to arm Iran.

“I don’t know that they’re enabling (Iran),” Trump said.