Alarmed western observers are warning that the wars in Ukraine and Iran could merge into a single region-wide conflict. Ukrainian drones struck an Iranian oil platform, a Russian missile boat, and sanctioned cargo ships in the Caspian Sea late last month. But in truth, Kyiv has regarded Iran as a combatant in the Ukraine war since the summer of 2022, when the first Shahed drones arrived in Russian-occupied Crimea and Kherson. These drones were accompanied by instructors from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who trained Russian operators in their use. Moreover, this was not even Ukraine’s first strike on an Iranian target in the Caspian. On August 14, 2025, the eve of the Trump-Putin Alaska summit and well before the US-Israeli campaign against Iran, Ukraine struck a cargo vessel carrying drone parts and ammunition from Iran at the Russian port of Olya, near Astrakhan.

If Kyiv wants to, it can devastate the Caspian just as it has already devastated enemy shipping in the Black Sea

What has changed, though, is that America is now desperate to end the Iran war, which the White House had wrongly assumed would be short and victorious. Kyiv’s military support against Iran, however small-scale, is intended to win points with the Trump administration. Ukraine is desperate for US-made Patriot missile interceptors, which have been exhausted by the Iran war. Without Patriots, Ukrainian defenders have been unable to stop Russian ballistic missiles from slamming into strategically vital targets. The port of Odesa, for instance, has been almost entirely put out of action by Russian missiles over the past month, a disaster for Ukraine’s economy, its farmers, and world food supplies.

The priority for Volodimir Zelensky, then, is to persuade Washington not only to reverse its general policy of cutting support but also to release stockpiles of valuable Patriot interceptors. “These systems should be saving people’s lives, not sitting in stockpiles,” Zelensky said last week. The ominous reality for Kyiv is that, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, the US has used roughly 65 percent of its prewar Patriot stocks defending its bases and allies against Iranian missiles. The US military newspaper Stars and Stripes reports that fewer than 827 interceptors remain. US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz called the reporting “nonsense” and said that the military has “everything it needs.” Nonetheless, Lockheed Martin’s current manufacturing capacity is around 600 to 620 interceptors a year, with production targeted to reach 2,000 a year by 2030 – nowhere near enough to replace even the 800 Patriot interceptors that the US burned through during the first five days of the Iran war.

In theory, at least, Ukraine has the capacity to open a major new front for the US against Iran. Until the Ukrainian strikes of August 2025, the landlocked Caspian Sea was very much a Moscow- and Tehran-dominated lake. Now, Kyiv has proved that its newfound long-range drone capabilities extend over the Caspian as well. Unlike deep strikes into Russian territory, Ukrainian bomber drones do not have to fly over thousands of kilometers of enemy territory to reach their targets; they can instead be routed over the Black Sea, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. If Kyiv wants to, it can devastate the Caspian just as it has already devastated enemy shipping in the Black Sea. Since 2022, Ukraine has systematically put Russia’s Black Sea Fleet out of action, mounted regular attacks on merchant shipping and oil tankers, and, this year, taken down the Novorossiysk oil terminal, knocking out not only Russian oil exports but also 80 percent of Kazakhstan’s westward export capacity as collateral damage.

In the wake of Ukraine’s July 25 Caspian strike, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned that the attack “cannot go unanswered” and said that he had complained both to Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, and – to the grim amusement of Brussels diplomats – to the European Union’s Kaja Kallas. In practice, however, Iran has already escalated about as far as it can, first by transferring thousands of Shahed-136 and Shahed-131 drones to Russia and then by licensing local production at the Alabuga plant in Tatarstan. Iran has also been sending Russia Fath-360 short-range ballistic missiles since September 2024. The Caspian corridor has long been the artery through which Iranian ammunition, artillery shells, and drone components have moved north to Astrakhan and Olya. In return, Russia launched Iran’s Khayyam satellite in August 2022, promised Tehran Su-35 fighters, and paid Iran much-needed hard currency. The first Shahed supply contract of 2022-23 alone was worth $1.8 billion, paid partly in gold. More importantly, Zelensky claims that, since the beginning of the US-Israeli assault on Iran, Moscow has been providing its Iranian allies with satellite intelligence on targets in the Gulf, including US bases.

Ukraine has also tried to make itself useful to Israel. As early as 2024, Ukraine began sending captured Shahed airframes and electronics to Israel and its western partners for counterdrone development. That knowledge helped Israel improve its air defenses against Iran’s attacks in April and October 2024, as well as during the current war. Kyiv has also sent its own interceptor drones and 228 specialists to five countries attacked by Iran: Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Paradoxically, the Gulf states need Ukrainian interceptors more than they need Patriots, as 83 percent of Iranian attacks on the United Arab Emirates during the war’s first two weeks involved Shahed-136 drones. Patriot batteries are designed to destroy short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, not low-flying, radar-evading, maneuverable Shaheds. Furthermore, as Zelensky has pointed out, it makes no sense to use a Patriot interceptor – with an average unit cost of $3.87 million – to destroy a $130,000 Shahed when Ukraine’s alternative interceptor drones cost around $10,000 each. Small wonder that Zelensky signed ten-year defense cooperation agreements with Saudi Arabia and Qatar in late March 2026, with an agreement with the UAE expected soon.

The bottom line is that neither Ukraine’s Caspian strikes nor its cooperation with the Gulf states has yet plugged its Patriot missile gap. Trump recently offered Ukraine – and France – licenses to manufacture their own Patriot interceptors. But Boeing, which makes the top-secret guidance systems, has balked at sharing the technology. Trump has since walked back his offer. In any case, there is no prospect of Ukraine’s domestically produced Patriot interceptors coming off the production line within the next two years – assuming that the factory were not repeatedly bombed by Russia. In the meantime, Ukraine has been left fatally vulnerable to Russian ballistic missiles, an unintended casualty of Trump’s ill-conceived war against Iran.