Ukraine is having a surprisingly good Iran war

Donald Trump’s decision to go to war in the Middle East has dealt a huge blow to Ukraine. It rescued Russia from a budget crisis, strained Kyiv’s debt-laden benefactors in Europe, ripped through stocks of critical US weapons that Ukraine’s now less likely to receive and prompted the White House to — yet again — press Volodymyr Zelenskiy to accept Russia’s territorial demands.

So, why does Ukraine’s embattled president seem so unfazed?

There are, no doubt, a lot of reasons, but one is that Ukraine has been manufacturing cards to play ever since the American president told Zelenskiy a year ago that he had none. Another is the substantial loss of US leverage over Kyiv, simply because it now offers so much less that it can threaten to take away.


At the time of that now infamous Oval Office ambush, Zelenskiy’s meek reaction seemed to cruelly expose the extent of his country’s dependence on US support for its survival. As recently as November, he gave an anguished address telling Ukrainians that they might soon face one of the most difficult choices in their history: Capitulate to Russia’s terms or lose an indispensable US ally.

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That anguish is hard to detect today. Now, as the White House again presses Kyiv to accept Russia’s demand that it hand over the so-called fortress belt of cities that has for four years been key to stemming Russian advances, Zelenskiy has pushed back in public. He said the US was tying its offer of security guarantees to his implementation of Russia's territorial ultimatum.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was clearly taken aback and called Zelenskiy a liar. He also said the door was open to withdrawing US weapons earmarked for Kyiv, as part of NATO’s so-called PURL program. But rather than back down for fear of upsetting Washington as in the past, Ukraine’s President responded by further detailing his claim.

This all takes some explanation, given Ukraine’s heavy dependence on US-made Patriot interceptors to bring down Russian ballistic missiles, as well as on Himars rocket systems and the real-time satellite and other intelligence that’s helped so much in targeting Russian forces. What's changed is that the US is no longer delivering all that much to Kyiv.

Since Trump came to office, Congress has appropriated no new funds for Ukraine, and funding lines from the previous administration have dried up over time. Trump in effect eliminated most support for Ukraine and monetized what remained by making Ukraine’s other allies pay for it through PURL.

“We have passed peak Trump,” Mykola Bielieskov, a researcher at Kyiv’s National Institute for Security Studies, which advises Zelenskiy’s office, told me. “To threaten something, it has to be there to take away — but we already had a deficit of interceptors, and after this conflict in Iran, US leverage has become even more limited.”

Lifting sanctions on Russia also is no longer such a threat, because the US already eased the most important of them, on crude exports, to help suppress oil price inflation caused by the Iran war. Even the amount of US intelligence shared with Ukraine has dropped, now that focus and resources have shifted to the Middle East, according to Bielieskov. Meanwhile, the offer of US security guarantees is fast losing its appeal.

Why, after all, would you give up critical defenses and territory in exchange for the promise of protection from an American president who brings new meaning to the concept of unreliability?

At the same time, Ukraine has itself become more attractive as a security partner, because of its innovations and experience in drone warfare. These have allowed it to force the Russian navy from parts of the Black Sea, while recent developments in both drone interception and robotic vehicles are helping to compensate against Russia’s large numerical advantages in manpower, tanks and artillery.

Russia’s spring offensive has begun and, judging by the laments from some of the country’s nationalist military bloggers, it’s incurring record casualties for almost no territorial gain. This they attribute to Russia’s failure to keep pace of Ukraine’s technological innovation.

Not only has the so-called kill zone around Ukraine’s forward positions become more deadly, but Russian logistics are increasingly at risk up to about 120 km (75 miles) behind the front lines. Increased production of long-range drones and missiles has allowed Ukraine to hit Russian energy infrastructure as distant as 2,000 km, at one point taking a claimed 40% of oil export capacity off-line.

Zelenskiy has begun to use that record in a search for new allies. Soon after war broke out in the Middle East on Feb. 28, he rushed some 200 trainers in drone interception to the Gulf states, leveraging Ukraine’s long experience with shooting down Iran’s Shahed loitering munitions to offer help with their war in exchange for support in his.

Ukraine’s leader says he signed 10-year deals worth billions of dollars with three of these wealthy petrostates — Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — at the end of last week. He said the agreements involved the supply and joint production of Ukrainian drones, as well as expertise, in exchange for Gulf energy and other “scarce resources.” He didn’t specify what those were, but had said before that he’d be looking for missile interceptors. Saudi Arabia has among the world’s deepest arsenals of the Patriot missiles Ukraine still so badly needs and in January got State Department approval to buy another 730 of them.

Zelenskiy also offered to help build in the Strait of Hormuz an equivalent to the system of layered defenses and insurance workarounds that’s kept Russia’s navy at bay and the Black Sea open for Ukrainian exports.

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Whether Ukraine could really open Hormuz, how long it can keep its renewed technological edge over a newly funded Russia, and how much its Gulf deals will in fact deliver are all open questions. But the US loss of leverage in Kyiv is clear and should raise questions in the White House.

For example, when planning for the attack on Iran, why was so little learned from watching Ukraine deal with Iranian Shaheds? Why has the White House not recognized that Kyiv is no longer just a military burden, but also a resource — even for the mighty US military? Why continue to relieve the pressure on President Vladimir Putin, even when he’s helping Iran to kill US servicemen and Zelenskiy is offering to help protect them?

Or, to put it in terms more familiar to President Trump, Ukraine has some surprisingly good cards, so play them.