Russia and Ukraine now fighting a new war – in the Middle East

The wars raging in Ukraine and Iran take place on different continents, involve different actors and – at least on first sight – have very different global strategic implications. Yet more than a month since the US and Israel unleashed their attacks on Iran, the conflict in Europe is slowly becoming entangled with the one in the Middle East.

To be sure, much of this entanglement still takes place away from the public eye. But its results are increasingly becoming clearer.

In the Middle East, Russia is strengthening its intelligence and military support for Iran.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is touring the capitals of Gulf states, offering to supply the region’s Arab monarchies with the expertise that Ukraine has developed in defending against Iranian-designed drones used by Russian forces against his country.

The dividing lines between the two conflicts are getting blurrier, just as US President Donald Trump deploys thousands of US troops to the Middle East for an anticipated ground assault meant to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

The durable partnership

Historically, Russia and Iran have not been great allies. At the end of World War II, the Russians had to be persuaded to relinquish their control over half of Iran’s territory; ironically, it was pressure from the US that forced Russian troops to leave the country.

Although Russia has never been as vocal as the West in opposing Iran’s quest to become a nuclear power, it shared global fears about a potentially nuclear-armed Iran, and about Iran’s export of its militant theocratic ideology.

Yet ultimately, the interests of Russia and Iran increasingly converged. Both felt threatened by US coercion and US-led economic sanctions. Both aspired to create their own spheres of influence. And both shared a determination to use their considerable oil wealth to develop new and more powerful military technologies.

The bonds between Iran and Russia were forged during the last decade when both deployed troops to Syria; the Russians did so because they wanted to safeguard their naval bases in the Mediterranean, while the Iranians were in Syria to prop up the Shi’ite regime of Bashar al-Assad.

And although their Syrian adventure ultimately ended badly, the two were drawn together even closer after 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and the Russian military found itself short of ammunition.

Leaked Iranian secret documents indicate that by the end of 2022, Iran had already sold 6,000 of its Shahed drones to Russia in a deal that proved to be a boon for both sides. The Iranians initially charged the Russians US$193,000 (S$248,000) for each drone, around four times what it cost Iran to produce them. But the Russians got a large quantity of a potent weapon with which to bomb Ukraine.

Since then, the links between the two flourished. By last year, around 90 per cent of all the Iranian-designed Shahed drones used against Ukraine were made in Russia. Currently, the Russians produce about 2,700 drones a month. And while in the early stages of the war, Ukraine experienced on average 75 drone attacks each week, it now gets around 900 per week. Most Ukrainians are killed today by technology pioneered in Iran.

The Russians also improved on the original Iranian technology. The coating on the Russian-made drones of Iranian design is better suited to avoid detection. Russia also refined its “wave” tactics in Ukraine, using mixed real and decoy drones to overwhelm Ukrainian defences.

All these technologies and tactics are now flowing back from Russia to Iran. Western and US intelligence reporting indicates that Russia is also providing Iran with detailed information on the locations and movements of US troops in the Middle East, including ships and aircraft, largely via imagery from Russia’s military satellite constellation.

Western intelligence analysts describe much of this as near real-time or “targeting quality” data, intended to help Iran and its regional proxies strike American and Israeli assets more effectively and at longer ranges.

All of this aid to Iran is accomplished while Russia remains careful not to confront the US directly. So, while Russia publicly condemned America’s “unprovoked acts of armed aggression” against Iran, Moscow sought to preserve its bargaining space with Washington on other issues, not least the negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.

Moscow’s job is made easier by President Trump’s reluctance to criticise any Russian action. When recently confronted with a media query about Russian support for Iran, he brushed it off as a “stupid question”.

On cue and fearful of annoying their top boss, all other US officials are refusing to criticise Russia directly; the line from Washington is that whatever Russia may be doing in Iran “has no appreciable impact on US actions”.

In private, however, US military planners admit that the increasing accuracy of some Iranian missile strikes – including the March 27 destruction of a hugely valuable US E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system aircraft on a Saudi Arabian airbase – is due to Russian satellite intelligence information made available to the Iranians.

The new partnership

But while the Russians double down on their links with Iran, the Middle East war also provided an opportunity for Ukraine to strengthen its international posture.

Initially, neither Israel nor the Arab states cared much about the Ukraine conflict. Israel was unmoved by the fact that President Zelensky is of Jewish origin, or that all Western countries with which the Israelis wish to be associated were lining up behind Ukraine.

Meanwhile, most Arab leaders were just interested in what the Ukraine war may do to the prices of oil and gas, rather than the finer points of strategy or international law.

Last year, the Saudis and the other Gulf monarchies hosted some of the initial meetings between Russian and Ukrainian officials, brokered by President Trump in an effort to put an end to the Ukraine war. And countries such as Qatar offered to mediate on humanitarian issues.

But otherwise, Arab involvement was often limited to just providing their gilded palaces as venues for diplomats.

All this changed over the past month. Mr Zelensky is now a cherished visitor in Gulf capitals, where he is received with grand honours. And defence treaties are being signed between Ukraine and all Gulf states. This is not just an instinctive “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” reaction from the Arab states. Instead, it is because Ukraine has the potential to be really useful in boosting the Gulf Arabs’ defences.

For decades, the monarchies of the Gulf spent literally trillions of dollars on shiny new US-made equipment, which proved not very cost-effective in defending them against the Iranian drones.

But Ukraine has developed a vast array of cheap and powerful “drone-killers”, operated by pilots tracking them on a monitor or wearing first-person-view goggles. They look like overblown rifle bullets, and are priced at about US$1,000 to US$2,000 each, a fraction of the multi-million dollars required to buy US interceptors.

These drone-killers work well – most Russian drones fired at Ukraine are now intercepted – and they can be produced in large batches, unlike the US interceptors, which remain in short supply.

The orders are pouring into Ukraine, not only from governments, but also from corporations. Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s top energy company, wants to operate its own drone defence system, based on Ukrainian designs.

And while until now Ukraine had the ingenuity to make drone interceptors but not the money, the Ukrainians can now look forward to plenty of cash for investment in their defence industries.

Ukrainian officers are already embedded with some of the military in the Gulf, to guide Arab governments on recent Iranian strikes, which now resemble Russia’s attritional approach in Ukraine: smaller, more frequent salvos of drones aimed at a broader target set of Gulf installations, including civilian and economic infrastructure.

Linkages and leverage

Predictably, both the Russians and Ukrainians are eager to exploit their enhanced influence.

Last week, Moscow apparently proposed a quid pro quo to the US under which the Russians would stop sharing intelligence information with Iran – such as the precise coordinates of US military assets in the Middle East – if Washington stopped supplying Ukraine with intelligence material about Russia. The offer was rejected by the Americans, but these are early days, and the Russians are certain to make additional offers, especially if the US gets eager to wind down its Middle East military operations.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are deftly exploiting their growing importance; President Zelensky is now increasingly claiming that the two wars – the one in Ukraine and the one in Iran – are part and parcel of the same conflict, and that if Washington wants to defeat the Iranians, it will also have to defeat Russia’s attempts to subjugate Ukraine.

Ukraine’s enhanced international profile is irritating some of its allies. The US has apparently asked Saudi Arabia for “clarifications” about the country’s newly concluded defence treaty with Ukraine. And some of Europe’s top defence manufacturers are envious that Ukraine’s cheap anti-drone products could ever be considered viable competitors to the expensive weapon platforms sold by the West.

Mr Armin Papperger, the boss of Rheinmetall, Germany’s largest arms manufacturer, recently dismissed Ukraine’s drone industry as one consisting of Ukrainian “housewives with 3D printers in the kitchen”. It was an astonishingly silly outburst, and one which earned an instant rebuke from Mr Zelensky, who retorted that “if every housewife in Ukraine really can produce drones, then every housewife could be the CEO of Rheinmetall”.

It is unlikely that the Ukrainians will displace top US and European manufacturers competing for lucrative contracts in the Middle East.

Still, there is no question that Ukrainian defence industries are now seen as having better answers to the needs of the future battlefield than the old legacy Western manufacturers still churning out heavy tanks and artillery pieces that do nothing to stop the Iranian drones raining upon the Gulf.

Either way, Mr Zelensky, who a year ago was publicly told in the White House by Mr Trump that he “had no cards”, has now discovered that the Ukrainians hold some very important cards, and that these could be profitably leveraged.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine will decide the outcome of the current Middle Eastern war. But their proxy confrontation, running in parallel to the fighting in the Gulf, acts as a reminder of how interconnected security crises around the world can be.

And it is also a signal of how the technological race for battlefield supremacy can create overnight strategic winners and forge surprising new alliances.