Ukraine has dispatched more than 200 experts to assist Gulf countries in defending against Iranian drones and is preparing to send nearly three dozen more, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this week. Addressing the UK Parliament on Tuesday, Zelenskyy stated, “What is happening around Iran today is not a faraway war for us – because of the cooperation between Russia and Iran. And we do not believe we have the right to be indifferent.”
The Shahed-type drones Iran has deployed against Gulf states are identical to those it sold to Russia in 2022. Russia has since produced thousands under license. Ukraine has shot down over 44,700 of them during the war with Russia, achieving a success rate close to 90% and aiming for 95%. Last month, Ukraine downed 3,238 Shahed-type drones – a record, according to Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov.
Zelenskyy is now marketing this expertise to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. He also offered to protect British bases in Cyprus, which were struck by a Shahed on March 2. He told British MPs, “Our experts would place interception teams, and set up radars and acoustic coverage. If Iran launched a large-scale attack – similar to Russian attacks – we would guarantee protection.”
US allies in the Gulf have been vulnerable to Iranian drones because they focused on high-altitude systems to counter ballistic missiles, neglecting low-altitude threats, said Oslo University missile expert Fabian Hoffmann. The issue is not efficacy but cost: US ballistic interceptors cost up to $10 million per shot, compared to roughly $3,000 for a Ukrainian interceptor drone to down a $50,000 Shahed.
Zelenskyy claimed Ukraine is “capable of producing at least 2,000 effective and combat-proven interceptors every day,” referring to drones developed by Ukrainian firms to shoot down other drones. “We need about 1,000 interceptors a day, and we can supply at least another 1,000 a day to our allies,” he said.
Ukraine’s offensive capability has also increased, according to former Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, now secretary of Russia’s Security Council. He reported that air attacks on Russian infrastructure surged fourfold to 23,000 last year, from 6,200 in 2024. Over the same period, “sabotage and terrorist attacks” rose by 40% to 1,830, he alleged.
Ukraine has deliberately targeted Russian energy infrastructure and defense manufacturing sites since last year, while developing its own long-range drones to compensate for a shortage of Western-supplied equipment. On Saturday, Ukraine’s General Staff said its forces struck the Afipsky Oil Refinery and the port of Kavkaz, both in Russia’s Black Sea region of Krasnodar Krai, potentially destroying the refinery’s main unit.
Two days later, they hit the Aviastar aircraft manufacturing plant in Ulyanovsk, which produces transport and tanker aircraft, though damage extent is unclear. On Tuesday, Ukraine set fire to the Yugnefteprodukt oil depot in Krasnodar Krai and an aircraft repair site in the Novgorod region.
Ukraine has intensified strikes against Russian logistics, equipment, and manpower near the front line, noted the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW). “These strikes have largely targeted Russian forces and assets in eastern and southern Ukraine, where Russian forces have been prioritizing offensive operations in recent weeks,” the ISW reported.
However, Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskii asserted that Ukraine has transitioned to offensive operations on the southern front. “The Ukrainian defense forces are holding specified positions, destroying the enemy, gradually advancing, and fighting for the liberation of populated areas,” he said on Saturday. Ukrainian military observer Konstantyn Mashovets believes Ukrainian forces have recaptured 400 sq km (154 sq miles) of territory in this direction since January.
These counterattacks are forcing Russia to redeploy units and reserves to the southern front, the ISW observed, suggesting Mashovets’s assessment is accurate. Perhaps the only recent positive development for Russia stems from the Gulf, where Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz to all oil exports except its own and a few pre-approved countries’ tankers, trapping an estimated 300 tankers.
The administration of US President Donald Trump suspended sanctions on Russian oil for the month until April 11 in an effort to curb soaring oil prices, providing a double windfall for Russia. “We are now giving Russia $140 million a day by releasing them from these sanctions,” US Senator Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, told NBC News. “The Trump administration is rewarding Russia at Ukraine’s expense.” “Russia’s windfall now exceeds anything we saw in 2022 after the Ukraine invasion,” when oil prices spiked again, wrote Brookings Institution senior fellow Robin Brooks.
The Financial Times estimated Russia earned an extra $1.3 billion to $1.9 billion by mid-March, a figure that could rise to $4.9 billion by month’s end. Oil also drove Russia’s other favorable news this week: Hungary reversed its approval of a 90-billion-euro ($104 billion) loan to Ukraine on March 16, insisting Ukraine repair the Druzhba pipeline supplying Russian oil, which was shut down after a Russian strike damaged it in late January. Ukraine has stated that repairs are a difficult technical task under constant threat of further Russian attacks.
Source: www.aljazeera.com