Ukraine is having a surprisingly good Iran war
So why does Ukraine’s embattled president seem so unimpressed?
There are undoubtedly many reasons for this, but one of them is that Ukraine has been producing cards to play since the American president told Zelenskiy a year ago that he had no cards in hand. Another is the significant loss of US influence over Kiev, as it now offers much less and can threaten to take it away.
During the now-infamous Oval Office ambush, Zelenskiy’s docile response seemed to brutally reveal how dependent his country was on US support for its survival. As recently as November, he gave a stinging speech in which he told Ukrainians they would soon face one of the most difficult choices in their history: surrender to Russia’s terms or lose an indispensable U.S. ally.
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This pain is difficult to detect today. Now, as the White House presses Kiev once again to accept Russia’s demand that it hand over the so-called fortress belt of cities that have been key to halting Russia’s advance for four years, Zelenskiy has publicly backed down. He said he linked the US offer of security guarantees to the implementation of Russia’s regional ultimatum.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was clearly surprised and called Zelenskiy a liar. He also said that the door is open to the withdrawal of US weapons allocated to Kiev under NATO’s so-called PURL program. But instead of backing down for fear of upsetting Washington as he has in the past, the Ukrainian President responded by further elaborating his claim.
There is an explanation for all of this, given Ukraine’s heavy reliance on US-made Patriot interceptors to shoot down Russian ballistic missiles, as well as Himars rocket systems, real-time satellite and other intelligence that has been very helpful in targeting Russian forces. What has changed is that the US no longer sends as much to Kiev.
Since Trump took office, Congress has allocated no new funds to Ukraine, and the previous administration’s funding sources have dried up over time. Trump essentially eliminated most of the support for Ukraine and monetized the remaining support by making Ukraine’s other allies pay for it through PURL.
“We are past Trump’s peak,” Mykola Bielieskov, a researcher at Kyiv’s Institute for National Security Studies who advises Zelenskiy’s office, told me. “To threaten something, it has to be there to eliminate it — but we already lacked preventers, and after this conflict in Iran, U.S. influence became even more limited.”
Lifting sanctions against Russia is also not that big of a threat anymore because the US has already relaxed crude exports, one of the most important sanctions, to help suppress oil price inflation caused by the Iran war. According to Bielieskov, even the amount of intelligence the US shares with Ukraine has decreased as focus and resources have shifted to the Middle East. Meanwhile, the US offer of security guarantees is rapidly losing its appeal.
After all, why give up critical defenses and territory in exchange for the promise of protection from an American president who has given new meaning to the concept of unreliability?
At the same time, Ukraine has become more attractive as a security partner thanks to its innovations and experience in drone warfare. These allow it to distract the Russian navy from parts of the Black Sea, while recent advances in both drone intercepts and robotic vehicles help offset Russia’s large numerical advantages in manpower, tanks and artillery.
Russia’s spring offensive has begun and, as some of the country’s nationalist military bloggers complain, it is causing record losses with almost no territorial gains. They attribute this to Russia’s inability to keep up with Ukraine’s technological innovation.
Not only is the so-called kill zone around Ukrainian forward positions becoming more lethal, but Russian logistics are also increasingly at risk, up to about 120 km (75 miles) behind the front lines. Increased production of long-range drones and missiles allowed Ukraine to strike Russian energy infrastructure from as far as 2,000 km away, at one point knocking out 40% of its claimed oil export capacity.
Zelenskiy began to use this record in his search for new allies. Shortly after war broke out in the Middle East on February 28, it sent some 200 trainers to Gulf states for drone intervention, offering assistance in their wars in exchange for support for their own wars, drawing on Ukraine’s long experience in shooting down Iranian Shahed munitions.
The Ukrainian leader said he signed 10-year agreements worth billions of dollars with three of these rich petrostates – Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – at the end of last week. He said the deals included expertise as well as the supply and co-production of Ukrainian drones in exchange for Gulf energy and other “scarce resources.” He did not specify what these were, but has previously said he would seek missile interceptors. Saudi Arabia has one of the world’s deepest arsenals of Patriot missiles, which Ukraine still desperately needs, and in January received approval from the State Department to purchase 730 more.
Zelenskiy has also offered to help build the equivalent of layered defenses and temporary insurance solutions in the Strait of Hormuz that keep the Russian navy at bay and the Black Sea open to Ukrainian exports.
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Whether Ukraine can actually open Hormuz, how long it can maintain its renewed technological edge over newly financed Russia, and how much return the Gulf agreements will actually deliver are all open questions. But the US’s loss of influence in Kiev is clear and should raise questions in the White House.
For example, why was so little learned from monitoring Ukraine’s dealings with the Iranian Witnesses as they planned to attack Iran? Why didn’t the White House realize that Kiev is no longer just a military burden but also a resource for the powerful US military? Why should we continue to ease the pressure on Iran when President Vladimir Putin is helping Iran kill US soldiers and Zelenskyy is offering to help protect them?
Or, to put it in President Trump’s more familiar terms, Ukraine has surprisingly good cards, so play them.
