How Putin and Zelensky View the War in Iran
On April 14th, as Kyiv braced for a round of Russian strikes, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, was seven hundred and fifty miles away, in Berlin, forging a defense agreement with Germany, part of a tour of European allies to raise support for military aid. But his mind seemed to be focussed on a different war, thousands of miles away, in the Middle East. In an interview with the German broadcaster ZDF, Zelensky griped that America’s top negotiators for both Ukraine and Iran, the special envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, “are constantly in contact with Iran and have no time for Ukraine.” Zelensky then noted severe shortages of the U.S. Patriot air-defense system, a vital tool for responding to Russian ballistic missiles. He suggested that the shortfall was due to more Patriot interceptors being used to counter Iranian attacks on America’s allies in the Middle East. “If the war lasts longer, there will be fewer weapons for Ukraine,” Zelensky said, adding that, “we have such a deficit right now, it can’t get any worse.”
Hours later, Zelensky was in Oslo. The Iran war was still on his mind. He told journalists that Russia might strike that night. “There are a lot of Shaheds in the sky over Ukraine now,” he said, referring to the drones that Russia purchases from Iran and often uses in attacks on Ukraine. “Perhaps missiles will also be involved.” Sure enough, in the early-morning hours of April 15th, Moscow struck Ukraine with three ballistic missiles and three hundred and twenty-four attack drones, including two hundred and fifty Shaheds, Ukraine’s Air Force said. The next night, Russia fired nineteen ballistic missiles, twenty-five cruise missiles, and six hundred and fifty-nine drones. The assault killed at least seventeen people, including a twelve-year-old boy, wounded dozens, and destroyed buildings. It was one of the largest aerial attacks of the four-year war.
Nearly two months into Iran’s war, its ripple effects are being felt around the world, as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and the global economy remains in shock. This includes soaring gas prices at the pump, seesawing stock markets, rising food and fertilizer prices, higher shipping-insurance costs, and fuel shortages that have touched off violence, work stoppages, and profiteering in parts of Asia and Africa. The United Nations Development Programme reports that higher energy prices, disrupted food systems, and economic slowdowns triggered by the war could push up to thirty-two million people globally into poverty. “War is development in reverse,” the U.N. Under-Secretary-General Alexander De Croo, who heads the U.N.D.P., told me. “We have achieved great progress over the last decades in lifting people out of poverty and reducing child mortality. But what you build up in decades you can destroy in seven weeks of war.” The burden, he added, falls heaviest on those least able to absorb the shock. But the war is also having a less visible, yet potentially more consequential, impact on some of the world’s other conflicts and crises. These spillover effects are deepening an arc of instability stretching from Europe to the Middle East, from Africa to Asia. They include economic and geopolitical consequences that could affect regional rivalries and security alliances for the foreseeable future, potentially causing the displacement of people and migration flows from “one affected region to another affected region,” De Croo said. “It will put tension on the regions which are already quite tense.”
The spillovers from American wars have long triggered global instability. The first Gulf War, in 1991, doubled oil prices and sparked inflation. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also disrupted oil markets, added trillions of dollars to the U.S. national debt, and caused regional insecurity, including contributing to the rise of the Islamic State and other extremist networks. But none of these conflicts affected so many corners of the world as swiftly as the Iran war. Its impact is “the greatest threat to global energy security in history,” Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency (I.E.A.), said in a recent report. “Compared to these other wars, the world is way more interconnected than it was at that point,” De Croo said. “You have way more trade flows, and you have way more financial flows.” And, unlike some previous conflicts, there have been few effective measures to stabilize the global economy. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 hobbled wheat and fertilizer supply chains, global food prices soared, exacerbating hunger crises in fragile countries such as Somalia. But the U.N.-brokered Black Sea Grain Initiative opened a maritime humanitarian corridor to allow exports, and other nations increased their own production to steady food prices. “We easily found a solution to get the grain out of Ukraine,” De Croo told me. “Here, it’s not so much the food itself; it’s the ingredients to create the food. And, in Ukraine, you could solve the problem by getting the ships out.”
The war in Ukraine is increasingly connected to the Middle East conflict. Before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in February, the Kremlin was under heavy pressure. The Russian economy was in a recession, with around one-per-cent growth last year, down from 4.9 per cent in 2024, in part because of Western sanctions. Oil revenues were at their lowest since the start of the Ukraine war. Then Iran retaliated by attacking oil and energy facilities in the Gulf and shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, through which over a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas flows. Oil prices skyrocketed. So, in March, the Trump Administration issued a waiver that lifted restrictions on the purchase of some sanctioned Russian oil for thirty days. On April 17th, it renewed the waiver. Two weeks ago, the I.E.A. reported that Russia’s oil revenues soared to nineteen billion dollars in March, from $9.7 billion in February. And the International Monetary Fund raised its forecast for Russia’s economic growth this year from 0.8 per cent to 1.1 per cent. “So the immediate economic benefit was lower supply stress,” Tatiana Mitrova, a global fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said last week. “The strategic cost was giving Moscow more cash, resilience, and room to continue its war and foreign-policy agenda.”
As Russia benefits from the Trump Administration’s policies, its agenda now includes supporting Iran. Moscow has reportedly provided Tehran with intelligence and targeting information to attack U.S. military positions, warships, and aircraft. Russian President Vladimir Putin is also providing Iran with diplomatic backing in the U.N. Security Council. Moscow has been unable to defeat a much smaller Ukraine on the battlefield, and stretched itself so thin in the process that it has failed to protect allies such as the ousted Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. By backing Iran, the Kremlin is trying to resurrect its geopolitical standing and show “that Russia is still a power to be reckoned with,” Hanna Notte, director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, in California, told me. “There’s a more diffused benefit for Russia from the Iran war,” she added, which is that the conflict “exposes a certain U.S. weakness, a certain U.S. impotence,” that the “U.S. military action is not going according to plan.” Russian propaganda, she said, is “tapping into this notion that the Trump Administration bit off more than it can chew with Iran,” a narrative that is “welcome from a Russian perspective.”
The Kremlin is also exploiting frictions between the United States and Europe over the latter’s reservations about the Iran war. Trump has denounced NATO allies for denying or limiting the use of their military bases in the U.S. campaign against Iran and for not sending warships to help open the Strait of Hormuz. He has accused them of turning their backs on the United States, declaring on Truth Social that “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN.” Moscow has described the tensions as signs of a frail American-led international system and a weak Europe. And it has sought to sow more division. The Russian special Presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev wrote in a post on X that “UK and EU warmongers are showing how deeply anti-Trump they really are. They tried to hide it for a long time, but now everyone can see it.” The Trump Administration has so far not called out Moscow for backing Iran. In fact, the U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has said that Russia was not “impeding or affecting” U.S. operations in the Middle East.” European officials have publicly disagreed. “These wars are very much interlinked,” Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign-affairs chief, said. “If America wants the war in the Middle East to stop, Iran to stop attacking them, they should also put the pressure on Russia, so they are not able to help them.”
Yet another secondary effect of the Iran war is the expansion of modern drone warfare to the Persian Gulf region. State-of-the-art drones, and the technology needed to intercept them, have become as important to national weapons arsenals as missiles, Patriot systems, fighter jets, and warships. Tehran has made cheap attack drones a key element of its war strategy, using them to target the oil and energy infrastructure of U.S. allies in the region. That has also provided an opening for Ukraine, which, throughout the past four years, has painstakingly built a homegrown defense industry that is producing sophisticated aerial and sea drones. Ukraine is making interceptors for as little as ten thousand dollars to counter Iranian-designed Russian drones that cost between eighty thousand and a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Zelensky said last month that Ukraine can produce two thousand interceptors per day, half of which it could offer to its allies as they face similar attacks. “We have clear evidence that Iranian Shaheds used in the region contain Russian components,” he said, with Moscow now reportedly sending Iran its own drones, possibly including upgraded versions of Iranian drones, with anti-jamming and advanced navigation systems, as well as the capability to carry larger payloads. “So what is happening around Iran today is not a faraway war for us, because of the coöperation between Russia and Iran.” By March, Ukraine had dispatched more than two hundred military experts to help Persian Gulf nations defend against Iranian drone attacks. Last week, Zelensky said Ukraine has signed three large security deals with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar to supply drones and build production lines, as well as provide anti-drone training and technology. “This is good for Ukrainian companies and the economy,” Orysia Lutsevych, the head of the Ukraine forum at the London-based think tank Chatham House, told me. “It’s also a question of image. Ukraine wants to show that ‘We’re the front line of a military technological revolution, and we are the origin of it. If you have security agreements and defense partnerships with us, you’ll be more secure.’ And that gives Ukraine a huge win globally.”
Ukraine’s new role in the Middle East underscores another effect of the Iran war: Gulf countries are rethinking their security alliances, especially their reliance on Washington as their primary security partner. Like Ukraine, and the tepid support it has received from the Trump Administration, the conflict in Iran has upended the Gulf countries’ perception of the United States as a reliable partner, and of its military bases as a deterrent against enemies and a force keeping the region stable. Instead, many of the Gulf countries now view Washington as prioritizing Israel’s interests over their own. “There’s a big concern about a hierarchy of alliance between the U.S. and Israel, and the U.S. and the Gulf States, and the Israelis are higher up on this hierarchy,” Dania Thafer, the head of the D.C.-based Gulf International Forum think tank, told me. Although it’s highly unlikely the Gulf countries will abandon the United States—Washington’s security guarantees are still their best option in the short term, evidenced by U.S. Patriot defense systems successfully repelling most of Iran’s missiles—there is already a shift to diversify their security and diplomatic alliances to hedge against the ambitions of both Israel and Iran to insure better protection in the future. “A weakened Iran means a strengthened Israel,” Thafer told me. “The U.S. is still the most important ally at the end of the day, but they have less credibility now.” Even before the war, Saudi Arabia had signed a defense agreement with Pakistan, which has since gained more credibility as a force in the region because of its mediating role between Washington and Tehran. Qatar could deepen its already close defense ties to Turkey, and China, which is close to Iran, could play a greater diplomatic role. There have even been preliminary discussions of a regional security arrangement, an Arab NATO, so to speak.
What’s increasingly clear is that the war in Iran has broken “Trump’s approach to reshaping Middle East geopolitics,” Jessica Genauer, an international-relations professor at the University of New South Wales, wrote in the Conversation. Trump’s plan was to integrate Israel into the region through the Abraham Accords, which established diplomatic relations for the first time between Israel and several Arab countries, including the U.A.E., Bahrain, and Morocco. A security alignment with Israel was pitched as a way to deter Iran. But the war has damaged that argument. Iran hit the U.A.E. the hardest, even though it is Iran’s second-largest trading partner. It’s now unlikely that other Gulf nations, such as Saudi Arabia, will seek to normalize ties with Israel, especially with Iran still in control of the Strait of Hormuz. “I don’t think any Gulf state is interested in participating in the Abraham Accords,” Thafer said. “Iran created an incentive structure not to join the Abraham Accords by attacking the U.A.E. more than Israel. The fact that they targeted the U.A.E. disproportionately compared to the other Gulf states was a way to punish its alliance with Israel.”
Meanwhile, Russia is trying to punish Ukraine on the battlefield. The additional billions that Moscow has reaped because of the Iran war is easing some pressure off Russia’s floundering economy and the Kremlin’s ability to finance the conflict in Ukraine. Moscow has stepped up its ballistic-missile attacks across the country, triggering deaths and mayhem. Ukraine, in turn, has escalated drone attacks on Russian energy infrastructure to reduce Moscow’s newly permitted oil exports. But the shortages of Patriot defense systems remain a concern amid reports that the Pentagon is considering diverting advanced defensive weapons earmarked for Ukraine to the Middle East. Around eight hundred Patriot interceptors were used by the U.S. in the first three days of the Iran war—more than Ukraine received over four years of conflict, according to Zelensky. On Saturday, Moscow pummeled the central city of Dnipro and other areas for more than twenty hours with barrages of missiles and drones, killing at least seven people. “It is important that the world does not remain silent about what is happening and that this Russian war in Europe is not overshadowed by the war in Iran,” Zelensky wrote on X after the attacks. It’s in Russia’s favor to prolong the war in Iran. The longer it lasts, the longer Washington’s attention is not on Ukraine, and the fewer advanced weapons reach Kyiv. The longer oil prices remain high, the more billions the Kremlin adds to its coffers to fund the war. The deeper the rifts between the United States and Europe over Iran, the greater the chances of weakening the NATO alliance. “Putin sees the Ukraine war as part of a European war,” Lutsevych, of Chatham House, said. “And the conflict within NATO is another big win because it means that America might not come to defend Europe if Russia attacks.” Timothy Ash, a Russia expert at Chatham House, said that the United States running down its supply of Patriots in the Persian Gulf at Ukraine’s expense will “encourage Putin to go longer in Ukraine, to hold out further. He’ll see weakness in the West, weakness from Trump, and he’ll think he can extract better concessions from Ukraine. This means the war goes on longer.” And so will the conflict in the Middle East. ♦