A belated Russian awakening?

The most interesting part of this article about the Iranian regime's obscene Holocaust-denial "conference" is the second-to-last paragraph:

Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for the Russian President Vladimir Putin, insisted that differences with the US and Britain over the approach to Iran were purely tactical. "Strategically we're all on the same track. We may be more concerned about Iran than Britain and the United States," he said. "We are vitally interested about the preservation of the non-proliferation regime because we have Iran on our borders. We would be the last country in this world that would want the existence of nuclear arms in Iran."

This would not be the first case of a Russian regime experiencing a shockingly belated awakening to a threat to the civilized world. Stalin initially allied the Soviet Union with Hitler in order to grab the Baltic states and eastern Poland. Perhaps he also hoped that Nazi Germany and the rest of the West would fight each other to exhaustion, leaving the USSR dominant. All available evidence is that he absolutely refused to consider the possibility that the USSR itself might become a target of Nazi aggression -- right up until the invasion of 22 June 1941.

With Russia in recent years having suffered several Islamist terrorist attacks including the Beslan atrocity, Putin has even less excuse than Stalin did for harboring such illusions. Yet Russia has helped Iran with its nuclear program and is even supplying anti-aircraft defenses which would make an American airstrike against the program far more difficult. A cynical strategy to make money and curry favor with the Islamists, knowing that the US will save the day in the end? Or a genuine repetition of Stalin's self-delusion? Whichever it is, Peskov's comment suggests that a saner view may at last be taking root. The Russian people had better hope so -- for the Islamists have a long list of grievances against their giant infidel neighbor to the north, and the next 22 June might be nuclear.