Russia, it would seem, is finally making some of the right noises about tougher sanctions against Iran. Excellent.

But is it being reflexively suspicious to ask what’s the deal, where’s the catch, the quid pro quo that the United States and/or its friends will be pressed to concede in return?

You can assume that Russia, never amused by the notion of a potential nuclear armed Islamic power on its southern flank, has been waiting for the right moment when its status as Iran’s major arms supplier and purveyor of civilian nuclear wherewithal could be leveraged into maximum yield.

Last week, Nikolai Patrushev, the usually hawkish secretary of Russia’s Security Council, suggested that his bosses regard that this propitious interval starts now.

He offered up an acceptance of the obvious — for years withheld by Moscow — saying, in effect, that the mullahs want to make a bomb. And he combined that revelation with the not fully articulated subtext that maybe, just perhaps, we might find a way to slow the project down.

This was not Russia in a cooperative epiphany, or a conversion to sympathy for the West.

That isn’t happening. Publication in Moscow the week before of a new military doctrine for the decade, in which the possibility of NATO’s expanding its membership eastward was held up as an existential threat to Russian security, certified the opposite.

But while draft papers listing possible sanctions against Iran circulate at the U.N. Security Council — the French are reportedly recommending action to cut off Iranian gasoline imports, the Americans avoiding it — the Russians seem to see the juncture as one where the Obama administration is susceptible to maximum pressure. And one where helping on Iran and dimming the prospect of a fundamentalist theocracy with nukes puts Russia on track for a payoff.