In 1982, the war turned in Iran's favor and the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini pledged not to stop the conflict until he had overthrown the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

[1] Iraq, along with Syria and the PLO, had replaced Egypt as the Soviets' chief ally in the region after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat aligned with USA, and recognized Israel in 1977 and made a peace treaty in 1979 .

[4][5] At the same time, the USSR attempted to court Iran and offered to sell arms to the Iranians, a bid for friendship which was rejected by Tehran, due to its historic distrust of Russia and the Soviet Union.

The complicated balancing act of trying to maintain good relations with both Iran and Iraq led the USSR to observe a policy of "strict neutrality" during the opening phase of the war while calling for a negotiated peace.

This "Islamic factor" became a major[citation needed] concern for the Soviet leadership during the last phase of the Iran–Iraq War and led them to boost arms supplies to Iraq.

Between 1986 and 1988, the Soviets delivered to Iraq arms valued at roughly $8.8 to $9.2 billion, comprising more than 2,000 tanks (including 800 T-72s), 300 fighter aircraft, almost 300 surface-to-air missiles (mostly Scud Bs) and thousands of pieces of heavy artillery and armored personnel vehicles.

Soviet aid allowed Iraq to begin a renewed offensive against Iran in April, 1988, the success of which led to a ceasefire and the end of the war on August 20 of that year.

[15] "Although the Soviets might not receive payments for several years, the sale of military hardware remained a critical source of revenue for them, and they have tried to retain Iraq as a customer ...

When the Iran–Iraq war began, the United Nations (UN) responded with Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire and for all member states to refrain from actions contributing to continuing conflict.

The Iraqi Communist Party, driven from Iraq by the Ba'athist regime, was allowed to broadcast calls for the end of the war from the Soviet Union.

[18] Movement away from Soviet doctrine was also seen in land warfare, where the Iraqis also learned to place greater emphasis on training and preparation for complex combined arms operations.

[20] Cordesman cites Jane's Defence Weekly[21] as reporting that the Soviet Union had to reschedule its satellite coverage during the more intense periods of tension between Iran and the West.

[23] In 1979, the Soviet Union supplied Iraq with 240 fixed-wing and helicopter aircraft, along with military advisors, initially stationed at as-Shoibiyah Air Base 45 km SW of Basra.

Some Israeli experts came to regard Iraqi ability to manage the command and control and electronic warfare aspects of their Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missile systems as far inferior to those of Syria, even considering the poor Syrian performance in 1982.

[33] That the Soviets were willing do so selectively, as when they proposed shipment of advanced naval mines from Libya to Iran, saying "opposed the unauthorized transfer of their military technology to a third country" indicates that some exports were tolerated.

[32] This agreement also provided Soviet advisors, justified as helping defend Iran against U.S. attack, as in the April 1980 Operation Eagle Claw hostage rescue.

[33] This expanded, by the mid-1980s, into the domestic capability to manufacture arms of moderate complexity, such as armored fighting vehicles, artillery, and some missiles and aircraft parts.

Furthermore, the routes for physical delivery of weapons had to be modified too, as Egypt and Saudi Arabia started inspecting and seizing Iranian bound cargo ships through Suez Canal and the Red Sea and these modifications went as far as airlifting of tanks from Syria.

The "hard" variant, proposed by Karen Brutents (ru; first deputy chief of the Central Committee International Department)[38] and Aleksandr Yakovlev (Politburo member and head of the Foreign Policy Commission), wants cooperation with "large, geopolitically important Third World States, regardless of their ideological orientation."

Moscow has...moved closer to Saudi Arabia and Iran..."[37] As mentioned in the introduction, Mikhail Gorbachev had a new model of Soviet foreign policy when he came to power in 1985.

Rather than supporting only ideologically compatible state, he saw country-specific bilateral agreements, involving economic cooperation, as a means of offsetting US power in the Persian Gulf.

[42] Other opportunities, although primarily realized after the war ended, involved Soviet technology for components and systems beyond the short-term capabilities of Iran to design.

When they made the tactical mistake of chartering tankers, they quickly adapted to moving the Western forces out of the Gulf, "by tilting away from Kuwait and towards Iran.

In 1981, a Central Intelligence Agency document said that the Soviet Union is likely to hasten the delivery of $220 million in "ground equipment", and to permit Eastern European countries to "selectively provide some items in short supply.

[32] Soviet personnel, in late 1981, started construction of a surveillance station in Baluchistan, in a location that gave a view of the Afghan and Pakistani borders.

The Shoravis were also remarked in Balouchistan, where starting in late 1981 they began work on a network of ground surveillance stations that would be linked to an enormous listening base dug into the side of Kuh-e-Malek-Siah mountain, which dominated the Iranian-Afghan-Pakistani border.

[47][48] Complementing the first station at Kuh-e-Malek-Siah, an intelligence base at Gardaneh Pireh Zan allowed surveillance of air activity in northern Saudi Arabia.

Coupled with other Soviet intelligence facilities in South Yemen, Ethiopia, and Syria, the installations achieved complete coverage of the Arabian Peninsula.

Its AN/AWG-9 radar, unique in capability at the time, allowed Iran to use the F-14's not as front-line fighters, but as "mini-AWACS" early warning and tactical control platforms.

One goal was surface-to-surface missiles, which, given the disparity in size and design objectives, are cheaper and less complex than a multirole fighter aircraft such as the U.S. F-4 Phantoms that were the backbone of the Iranian Air Force.