Proxy war in Ukraine?

[Thumpalumpacus]

Iran is doing this to gain leverage, through a relatively weak form of blackmail, to bring the US back to the nuclear accord which the US unilaterally withdrew from, in order to remove the sanctions that the US unilaterally reimposed under trump.    the blackmail is weak because iranian aid is unlikely to decisively influence  the progress of the campaign over winter or  tip the outcome of the war,  and Iran does not have the means to escalate her intervention to affect the desires outcome if her initial blackmail fails. 

Yet all the same, it damages the Iranian ability to drag the US back into the JCPOA. If that's their aim, it strikes me as poorly conceived. Why would the Americans go easy in a discussion about nuclear arms when Iran is busy opposing a main aim of American foreign policy -- no matter the result of Iranian support for Russia?

I agree with you that this is not Iranian proxy-warring. I think it's more a matter of leveraging Irani-Russo relations to gain non-Western access to nuclear materials or technology. "Hey, we helped you out, cut a brotha some slack".

The Iranian proxy war, in my opinion, has been and remains in Yemen. That's obviously a proxy-war against Saudi Arabia rather than the US directly, although our hands are plenty dirty there. The Iranians are clearly worried about SA and other Arab states stifling its own aims and in Yemen are seeking to distract the Arabian coalition from addressing what the Arab states see as the Iranian Problem™ by putting a stone in the heel of the Arabian boot.