You know they can run NAT at the border right? Iran -> Russia -> the rest of the Internet. Russians would never re-advertise Iranian routes, and because they're all such good pals they could let them use whatever segment, so all Iranian traffic would simply appear as Russian traffic to the rest of the Internet, using normal residential subnets of which there are plenty. No need to ever involve the commercial VPN providers, and the scale would be negligible considering we're only talking about "the elites" of which there aren't many.

This is not as hard as you think.