Pakistan: BLA Rampage In Balochistan – Analysis

June 2, 2026 
SATP
By Tushar Ranjan Mohanty

On May 24, 2026, at least 30 people were killed and 50 were injured after a blast caused by a vehicle-borne suicide bombing tore through a shuttle train near Chaman Phatak in Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan. The shuttle service was travelling from Quetta’s cantonment area to connect with the Jaffar Express long-distance train when the blast occurred, a Railways Ministry statement disclosed. Immediately after the blast, BLA spokesperson Jeeyand Baloch declared that the group accepted responsibility for what it called a “highly organized fidayeen attack” on a train carrying Pakistani military personnel.

On May 25, 2026, BLA released a detailed statement to the media, claiming the death of at least 82 military personnel and injuries to more than 121. According to the statement, the dead and wounded include junior commissioned officers (JCOs), non-commissioned officers (NCOs), soldiers, and newly recruited personnel. Spokesperson Jeeyand Baloch stated that this successful operation was a severe blow to the ‘enemy’ Army’s new and secret travel protocol, which was introduced after the March 11, 2025 Jaffar Express hijacking and the November 9, 2024, attack on Quetta Railway Station carried out by Majeed Brigade suicide bomber Rafiq Baloch.

On May 16, 2026, BLA cadres killed six SF personnel during a clash in the Bypass area of Dalbandin town in Chagai District. According to a statement issued by BLA ‘spokesperson’ Jeeyand Baloch, the SFs attempted to advance into the area after militants seized control of parts of Dalbandin town. Two military vehicles were disabled during the exchange of fire, forcing SF personnel to retreat from the area.


On May 16, 2026, BLA cadres killed three SF personnel in an ambush on a military convoy in the Abad area of Kanak in Mastung District. While claiming responsibility for the attack in a statement, BLA spokesperson Jeeyand Baloch asserted that several other SF personnel were injured and one military vehicle was disabled during the attack on the Quetta-Taftan Highway.

On May 15, 2026, BLA cadres killed two SF personnel during a clash in the Mal area of Nushki District. In a statement claiming responsibility for the attack, BLA spokesperson Jeeyand Baloch said that BLA cadres had blocked the Quetta-Taftan Highway and conducted snap checking for several hours, during which four persons associated with the Saindak Project were also detained for interrogation.

On May 13, 2026, five SFs personnel were killed when the BLA cadres launched a heavy ambush on a SF checkpoint in the Kardgah area of Mastung District. In a BLA statement, spokesperson Azad Baloch claimed responsibility for the attack.

On May 12, 2026, two SF personnel were killed while one sustained injuries when BLA cadres attacked a SF checkpoint in the Mangochar area of Kalat District. According to a statement issued by BLA spokesperson Azad Baloch, the attack was carried out at around 10:00 AM. The outfit further claimed that surveillance cameras installed at the SF camp were destroyed during the attack.

According to partial data compiled by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), at least 60 BLA-linked incidents have already been recorded in 2026, and at least 222 persons, including 48 civilians, 71 SF personnel and 103 militants, have been killed (data till May 31, 2026). During the corresponding period of 2025, 59 such incidents resulted in 245 fatalities, including 32 civilians, 159 SF personnel and 54 militants. The whole of 2025 recorded 134 incidents in which 454 persons were killed, including 54 civilians, 339 SF personnel and 61 militants.


Since the beginning of the Baloch insurgency, 2025 has recorded the highest levels of violence, driven largely by BLA, which carried out the majority of militant attacks. In the deadliest attack of 2025, BLA militants hijacked the Jaffar Express on March 11, after blowing up a section of the railway track near Dhadar in the Bolan District, disrupting the train’s journey from Quetta (Balochistan) to Peshawar (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa). More than 400 passengers were on board when the train was seized. In response, the Pakistan Army launched a rescue operation on March 12 and announced its conclusion on March 14, stating that all 33 militants involved had been killed. According to the Army, 26 hostages – including 18 SF personnel, three railway employees, and five civilians – were killed by the attackers before the retaliatory operation commenced. The military further reported that 354 hostages, including 37 injured passengers, were successfully rescued, while five Frontier Corps (FC) personnel lost their lives during the operation. BLA, however, disputed the official account, claiming that its fighters had inflicted a significant blow on the Pakistani military and had executed all 214 military personnel allegedly held hostage during the train siege.

While releasing its annual operations report for 2025, on January 7, 2026, BLA claimed at least 521 attacks across Balochistan, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,060 SF personnel. The report, titled Dhak, claimed that more than 556 personnel and informants were also injured in various attacks. BLA also claimed that it killed 75 people it labelled as informants, saying some were detained during raids and “sentenced to death” by a body it referred to as the “Baloch National Court.” The group said it carried out 15 “special operations” in 2025, four by the Majeed Brigade, six by the Fateh Squad and five by the Special Tactical Operations Squad (STOS). It added that its intelligence wing, the Zirab (Zypher Research and Analyses Bureau), played a key role in identifying targets and planning operations. The report claimed that BLA fighters conducted 212 explosions, including 112 improvised explosive device (IED) attacks, and destroyed 215 military vehicles and motorcycles, 35 quadcopters and surveillance drones, seven communication and surveillance towers, and three railway tracks. The group also said it seized 208 weapons from security forces and their collaborators, and further, that its members took control of 48 locations during the year, including what it described as military camps, Police and Levies stations, and the towns of Zehri, Mangochar, Surab, Mastung and Panjgur, and established more than 42 highway blockades across Balochistan. It claimed to have detained 366 people it referred to as “agents,” including some members of Pakistan’s armed forces.


Since August 1, 2004, when the first BLA-linked incident was recorded by SATP, at least 1,596 persons, including 353 civilians, 832 SF personnel, 391 militants, and 20 in the Not Specified category, have been killed (data till May 31, 2026). The first BLA-linked incident was recorded on August 1, 2004, when five soldiers and a civilian were killed in a targeted attack on SF vehicles in the Khuzdar District.

The persistence of enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings by state agencies has contributed to the cycle of violence in Balochistan, fostering deep-seated grievances and fuelling retaliatory attacks by Baloch insurgent groups against SFs and state institutions. Civilians accused of collaborating with the State, including members of pro-government armed groups often referred to as “death squads,” have also been frequent targets of insurgent violence. The resulting security vacuum and instability have created conditions conducive to the growth of Islamist militant outfits, some of which have operated alongside or in parallel with Baloch insurgent groups. The principal insurgent groups active in the province include the BLA, Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF), Balochistan Liberation Tigers (BLT), Baloch Republican Guards (BRG), Baloch Republican Army (BRA), Baloch National Army (BNA) and United Baloch Army (UBA). Among these, BLA has emerged as the most active and lethal insurgent formation, accounting for a significant proportion of major attacks in recent years.

Composed predominantly of members of the Marri and Bugti tribes, BLA emerged amid growing resentment in Balochistan over the exploitation of the province’s natural resources by the Pakistani state and the persistent neglect of its socio-economic development. The group is estimated to maintain a strength of approximately 6,000 cadres operating across Balochistan and in adjoining border regions of Afghanistan. Among its ideological and political forebears was Sardar Akbar Khan Bugti, the former Chief Minister and Governor of Balochistan, who was killed during a military operation on August 26, 2006 – a defining moment in the evolution of the contemporary Baloch insurgency. Following Bugti’s death, the leadership of BLA passed to Balach Marri, who remained at its helm until his death in Afghanistan on November 21, 2007. Thereafter, his brother, Hyrbyair Marri, assumed the leadership of the organization from exile in London, where he has continued to serve as its principal political figure. The group’s military operations are reportedly directed by current ‘commander-in-chief’ Bashir Zeb Baloch, who assumed command in 2018, following the death of its earlier leader Aslam Baloch.

Among the various Baloch insurgent groups, BLA is distinctive for maintaining a dedicated suicide unit known as the Majeed Brigade. The brigade is named after Majeed Langove Senior and Majeed Langove Junior, who are revered within the organization for carrying out suicide missions in August 1974 and March 2010, respectively. Majeed Senior attempted to assassinate then Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto during an official visit to Quetta, reportedly in retaliation to the dismissal of the National Awami Party (NAP) Government in Balochistan. The attempt failed, and he was killed during the operation. Decades later, Majeed Junior died while resisting an SF raid on a militant hideout in Quetta’s Wahdat Colony, enabling his associates to escape. Following his death, senior BLA ‘commander’ Aslam Achu formalized the group’s suicide warfare capability through the creation of the Majeed Brigade, which is currently led by Hammal Rehan Baloch.


The brigade conducted its first vehicle-borne suicide attack on December 30, 2011, targeting tribal elder Shafiq Mengal, son of former acting Chief Minister and Federal Minister Naseer Mengal, on Arbab Karam Khan Road in Quetta. Shafiq Mengal had long been accused by Baloch nationalist circles of leading a pro-state militia “death squad,” involved in counter-insurgency activities against Baloch insurgents. While the intended target survived the attack unharmed, the bombing resulted in the deaths of 14 people, including women and children, and injured another 35, underscoring the significant civilian toll associated with the insurgency’s evolving tactics.

Beyond the Majeed Brigade, BLA also maintains a specialized operational wing known as STOS, reportedly under the command of Bashir Zeb Baloch. The unit is tasked with conducting intelligence-led operations against military personnel and the members of “death squads.” STOS primarily functions as the BLA’s intelligence and reconnaissance arm, focusing on surveillance, target identification, intelligence collection, and operational planning, to facilitate precision attacks against designated targets.

In May 2021, BLA established an elite combat unit known as the ‘Fateh Squad’, composed of highly trained and experienced cadres selected for their demonstrated battlefield proficiency and operational capabilities. The squad was named in honour of Fateh Qambrani, a prominent BLA militant who was killed during an assault on an Army camp in the Meshdari area of Shahrag tehsil in Harnai District in September 2018. According to the organization, Qambrani’s actions were instrumental in facilitating the capture of the military installation and he had previously played a significant role in several other insurgent operations. The Fateh Squad is reportedly tasked with spearheading high-risk assaults, with its cadres drawing on extensive combat experience to lead attacks on military and paramilitary installations. Acting as the vanguard of such operations, the unit is intended to breach defensive positions and create opportunities for follow-on forces to penetrate and secure targeted facilities.


On April 13, 2026, BLA announced the creation of a new maritime wing, the Hammal Maritime Defence Force (HMDF), and claimed responsibility for what it characterized as its first naval operation. The unit was named after Hammal Jiand Baloch, a historical figure associated with resistance against Portuguese incursions along the Makran coast during the sixteenth century, whom the organization portrays as a symbol of maritime resistance. In a statement issued to the media, BLA spokesperson Jeeyand Baloch asserted that HMDF had been established to safeguard what the group described as Baloch maritime interests, particularly in response to the alleged exploitation of coastal resources and the expanding security presence along the province’s coastline. The announcement followed an attack reportedly carried out on April 12, 2026, near the Jiwani area of Gwadar District, in which three personnel of the Pakistan Coast Guards (PCG) were killed after their patrol vessel came under fire at sea. The incident marked a notable development in the BLA’s operational evolution, suggesting an effort to expand its insurgent activities into the maritime domain.

Earlier, on February 12, 2026, BLA announced the operationalization of its dedicated aerial warfare and drone unit, QAHR (Qazi Aero Hive Rangers), marking a significant expansion of the organization’s technological and operational capabilities. In a statement issued to the media, BLA spokesperson Jeeyand Baloch stated that the unit had successfully completed its initial missions during the second phase of Operation Herof(Operation Dark Storm). According to the organization, the establishment of QAHR reflected an effort to adapt the Baloch insurgency to the evolving requirements of modern warfare through the integration of unmanned aerial systems and advanced operational technologies. The unit was named after senior BLA commander Abdul Basit Zehri, also known as Qazi, who was credited with promoting technological innovation, research, and institutional development within the movement and is regarded as a key figure in the unit’s creation. The spokesperson further claimed that QAHR’s inaugural operational deployments were conducted during Operation Herof II, with coordinated drone strikes targeting Gwadar Port highlighted as the most significant of these actions. The announcement underscored BLA’s growing emphasis on technological adaptation and the diversification of its insurgent capabilities beyond conventional guerrilla tactics.


BLA’s increasing strength and sophistication are reflected in the execution of Operation Herof, a two-phase coordinated campaign carried out in August 2024 and subsequently in February 2026. The first was conducted on August 25-26, 2024, with coordinated and simultaneous attacks across seven Districts. This was the largest act of retribution by any Baloch insurgent group. In the early morning of August 26, 2024, BLA cadres offloaded passengers from trucks and buses in the Rarasham area of Musakhail District and shot them after checking their identities. At least 23 Punjabi travellers were killed. The armed men also set fire to 10 vehicles. As the day progressed, Balochistan recorded multiple attacks across the province, which left at least 38 people dead, including the 23 in Musakhail. In response, SFs neutralised 21 terrorists and injured several others. BLA cadres then targeted Levies Forces and Police Stations in Mastung, Kalat, Pasni, and Suntsar, resulting in numerous casualties. Explosions and grenade attacks were reported in Sibi, Panjgur, Mastung, Turbat, Bela, and Quetta, with militants blowing up a railway track near Mastung. The ISPR issued a statement later in the day, claiming that 21 terrorists had been killed, while 14 SF personnel, including four from law enforcement agencies, were killed during ‘clearance operations’.

However, in a statement released on its official media, Hakkal, BLA announced the successful completion of its fidayeen Operation Hereof, claiming to have killed 130 military personnel during a series of coordinated attacks across Balochistan. BLA spokesperson Jeeyand Baloch claimed that the group’s elite fidayeen unit, the Majeed Brigade, had maintained control over the Bela Army Camp for 20 hours, during which 68 military personnel were killed and dozens more injured. After achieving the objectives of Operation Herof, the roadblocks on all highways were lifted.

The second part of Operation Hereof was launched on January 31, 2026, when BLA cadres launched coordinated attacks at 48 locations across 14 cities in Balochistan, killing 84 personnel of the Army, Police, intelligence agencies and CTD. BLA spokesperson Jeeyand Baloch stated that BLA had “taken control of multiple enemy posts, including central military headquarters,” and that movement of Pakistani forces had been “severely restricted.” According to the group, several units, including the Fateh Squad, the Majeed Brigade, the intelligence wing ZIRAB and STOS, were operating jointly across different Districts. On February 6, BLA said that the second phase of its campaign had successfully concluded. Jeeyand Baloch added that the operation began at 5 a.m. on January 31 and ended at 4 p.m. on February 6 after, according to the group, its “predefined objectives” were achieved, and the campaign had targeted 14 cities across Balochistan – termed the group’s “largest, most intense and most organised military operation.” He said 93 Baloch fighters were killed, including 50 from the Majeed Brigade, 26 from the Fateh Squad and 17 from STOS, while more than 362 Pakistani security personnel from the Army, Frontier Corps, Police and state-backed armed groups were killed.

Horrified by the continuous and escalating BLA attacks, security personnel have started hesitating to serve in Balochistan. After the first phase of Operation Hereof (August 25-26, 2024), while chairing the Provincial Apex Committee in Quetta on August 30, Prime Minister (PM) Shehbaz Sharif emphasized the need for the deployment of capable and talented officers in Balochistan, acknowledging that, due to security concerns, some officers hesitate to serve in the province. Announcing the policy, PM Sharif said half officers of the 48th Common Group of both Police and Civil side would be posted to Balochistan immediately for one year. The remaining half of the officers of the 48th Common Group would be posted after six months from their initial deployment, and would also serve for one year. Similarly, he said after one year, the first half of the officers from the 49th common group would be posted to Balochistan for one year. After one and a half years, the remaining half of the officers from the 49th group would be posted to Balochistan for one year. PM Sharif also announced that special incentives would be provided to officers deployed in Balochistan, including four air tickets for their families every three months. There is no readily available public evidence confirming implementation of these announced incentives.


With rising BLA attacks and roadblocks on all highways, security personnel and state functionaries no longer feel safe on Balochistan’s roads. Former Chief Minister and ex-speaker Jan Muhammad Jamali noted, on September 28, 2025, that Government ministers and party leaders could no longer travel safely by road, as armed groups expand their dominance over the region’s highways. On May 15, 2026, Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) parliamentary leader Sadiq Umrani emphasised that the security situation in Balochistan had deteriorated to the point where Ministers were unable to travel to their own areas by road. On May 22, 2026, Deputy Director and Commanding Officer of the Airport Security Force (ASF), Waseem Ahmed, was detained by BLA cadres during a snap-checking operation in Kalat District. In a brief statement issued to the media, BLA spokesperson Jeeyand Baloch confirmed that Waseem Ahmed was in the group’s custody.

Notwithstanding the Balochistan Government’s enforcement of Section 144 across the province on May 17, 2026, BLA demonstrated its operational capability by carrying out a large-scale attack in Quetta. BLA’s trajectory demonstrates a significant transformation from a conventional insurgent outfit into a highly adaptive and increasingly sophisticated militant outfit. Through the expansion of specialized units such as the Majeed Brigade, STOS, Fateh Squad, HMDF, and QAHR, the group has diversified its operational capabilities across land, maritime, and aerial domains. Its ability to conduct coordinated, large-scale attacks, impose highway blockades, target critical infrastructure, and challenge state authority across vast areas of Balochistan underscores a deteriorating security environment across and beyond the province.

Tushar Ranjan Mohanty
Research Associate, Institute for Conflict Management

How Consciousness Shapes Culture, Communication, And Shared Meaning – Analysis

June 2, 2026 
By Josh Fisher

Research suggests that human consciousness evolved as a cognitive filter, privileging and amplifying human-communicative inputs as a foundation for transmissive teaching and learning, language development, and, ultimately, cultural evolution and culture itself.

This piece explores human consciousness as the foundational engine of culture, tracing its evolution from early social learning in infants to the sophisticated shared meanings of prehistoric human communities. It examines how social consciousness—joint attention and reciprocal mirroring—enabled humans to transmit knowledge, develop language, and coordinate culturally, creating a feedback loop between individual and collective consciousness. The article draws on biology, anthropology, and linguistics, including case studies like Nicaraguan Sign Language, to illustrate how shared meaning emerges. Its central argument: consciousness facilitates transmissive teaching and learning, which underpins human cultural evolution and the cumulative growth of knowledge across generations.

Consciousness as Cognitive Filter

Research suggests that human consciousness evolved as a cognitive filter, privileging and amplifying human-communicative inputs as a foundation for language development, transmissive teaching and learning, and, ultimately, culture.

Fortunately, humans do not wait for a full understanding of things before they converse about them. Love is a good example, perhaps the best one. We have been talking about, singing about, painting, and dancing around “love” almost certainly from the beginning of our species’s communicative existence, and yet, what exactly love is, is a real question we could take up in earnest at any time without embarrassment. The same goes for concepts like maturity, character, respect, common sense, trust, leadership, normalcy, and, of course, consciousness. We can often do no better than to say merely that we know these things when we see them.


When humans do recognize consciousness, they tend to agree on a set of similar intuitive descriptions: it is like an inner self capable of observing our mental activity, an inner witness, or a piece of cerebral machinery that equips its owner with the sense that “I am” and “what it’s like to be me.”

We tend to speak of consciousness as something uniquely human, even after accounting for our scientific ignorance and allowing for the possibility of consciousness in “lower” animals, individual cells, or the entire universe.

Biological science furnishes us with its own constraining assumptions and intuitions about human consciousness: it likely evolved in some way across vast expanses of time; its roots likely stretch far back into prehistory; and it likely served, and perhaps continues to serve, an important purpose or set of purposes for the human species that possesses it, purposes that remain a mystery.

To this array of conversational and scientific intuitions, let us add those of archaeologists and anthropologists. The appearance of sophisticated tool refinement, the creation of art, the rise of elaborate burials, and the evolution of organized communities in the archaeological record are physical marks that are quintessentially human, indicators of consciousness, and as mysterious as they are.


It is likely that our various intuitions about consciousness are mostly true and that the mysteries connect. That is, human consciousness not only supplies us with a seemingly dualistic sense of “inner self” but also the one that represents the first click of the ratchet effect—the process responsible for cultural evolution and believed to be behind organized settlements, tool refinement, and art.

An infant sticks out its tongue, and their parent sticks out theirs. This phenomenon is known as human reciprocal mirroring. It is how social learning occurs. The infant imitates, then, crucially, pauses to monitor the parent’s reaction. Although non-human apes can occasionally manage this kind of behavioral imitation, they do not engage in reciprocal mirroring. In human infant-parent communication, each is aware that the other is aware that they are aware, a recursive process that represents an alignment of consciousness that goes back to the start of life. The infant is ready to be both observer and participant, actor and audience. It just needs the content of human social life (the scenes, experience, and knowledge) to start putting meat on the bones of this “inner self,” which is shaped by a rapidly changing social world. This same process of experience and learning from others is what gives social learning its footing. Nearly everything the infant will learn in its life will occur through this process.

What this exchange shows is that human consciousness, both social and individual, is what makes cumulative human culture possible. From the start, the mind is built to align with other minds, allowing knowledge to move between people and persist across time. Meaning is not merely passed along but stabilized and carried forward through this recursive awareness, so that what is learned does not vanish with the learner but becomes part of a shared, revisitable world.

How did our species arrive at this moment where all of its newest members are ready to learn, quickly and accurately, how to communicate?

Social Consciousness

Our story is generally thought to have started around 300,000 to 400,000 years ago with the consolidation of human social consciousness. This capacity can be described as “the spontaneous adoption of another person’s perspective,” as in the relationship between a parent and their infant. The increasing strength of this mutual attention in humans—especially, among groups of humans—gradually allowed for the generation of joint representations, or ‘objectified,’ agreed-upon percepts from the surrounding natural and social environments.


Human social consciousness—a term used here as an alternative to joint attention—forms both a literal and a figurative breeding ground for the consciousness we experience now. In simple terms, it can be understood as a communication channel. We witnessed this when the parent and infant were sticking out their tongues; joint attention automatically opens a channel, and the participants, parent and infant, communicatively imitate each other within it. Opening of communication channels also happens in larger groups, even with strangers. Each channel internally represents shared meanings, called joint representations, and participants can now point, imitate, use gestures and movements, vocal pitch, and other, even unintended, signals to coordinate within and across these social situations and explore them. The unconscious, automatic nature of this process is something we very much take for granted. For example, we will follow others across the street at a crosswalk, against the light, even though we are total strangers who have never spoken a word to each other, and never will again. We know without trying that everyone has the same joint representation.

The stage is now set for the gradual evolution of individual consciousness in humans, with tools of social consciousness becoming available to individuals at birth. This evolution allows communities to grow across vast spaces while remaining close-knit. Maybe it began in the Middle Paleolithic era (the Paleolithic era, characterized by the development of stone tools, extended between 3.3 million to 11,700 years ago) when little bands of humans begin to make some cultural progress, but only when they are together physically—a condition that fits well with Merlin Donald’s (1993) view that early human cognition remained heavily dependent on socially enacted forms of representation. This need for proximity makes cultural progress very slow because the necessity of staying together limits the sheer numbers, territorial reach, and outside cultural contacts of these human tribes. Even with a developing language and other signs of modern human sophistication, once a group’s culture became complex beyond a certain limit, generational change under social consciousness, without a robust individual consciousness, could only sustain it, not grow it further.

Shared Meaning: Gestures, Signs, and Grammars

It is reasonably likely that human tribes that were most successful at creating joint representations (i.e., shared meanings) across time and distance—quickly learning them, remembering them, and, importantly, coordinating themselves to them—were much better at adapting to the rapidly changing climates of the Pleistocene Epoch (from 3 million to 12,000 years ago).

Although they may not have had words at first, their emerging communication channels were by no means empty of content. A fairly sophisticated “folk physics” did not have to be effortfully shared and developed. For example, each member of the “superorganism” (groups of humans) automatically brings with them the intuition that “what goes up must come down,” which becomes part of objective joint representations. Similarly, humans experience shared emotions and shared inferences without words. Thus, humans started this process of developing shared meanings across time and space already equipped with several joint-representational hooks on which they could hang new vocabulary and new evidence of shared meaning. The shared landscape and environment also provided physical hooks: the stars are in relatively fixed positions, the mountains in the distance do not move, a nearby tree appears human-like, deviations from routine are noticeable, and certain animals predictably appear at specific locations at specific times. These stable representations become, for creatures with social and then individual consciousness, objects around which shared meaning becomes centered.


How did humans use these hooks to build language, constructing shared meanings outside immediate experience? As Israeli linguistic theorist Daniel Dor explains in his book The Instruction of Imagination, language was not a ready-made code inside individual minds but a public technology, one which groups of humans gradually invented to instruct one another’s imaginations. Speakers turned subjective experiences into compact, conventional instructions that helped listeners construct similar scenes in their minds. This process involves a mutually agreed-upon sign and its use in various situations. In this view, language (not just words, but a shared emotional, conceptual, and coordinative meaning) exists between people as a network of norms and conventions.

Functionally, the process, which follows the usage-based, joint-attention model of language development articulated by Michael Tomasello in Origins of Human Communication, can be summarized in a few steps:

1. Anchor

A speaker points or otherwise recruits joint attention to a salient, shared experience and pairs it with a form, for example, a gesture or sound. Gesture is often the most effective starting point, with pantomime and pointing supplying the first instructions, and vocalizations or hand signs becoming more useful as conventions accumulate.

2. Mutual identification

Others agree that this experience counts as the anchor for that form.

3. Generalization

Over repeated use, the group decides, often implicitly, what meanings the form can cover and where new distinctions deserve new signs.

4. Linkage

Signs (shared meanings) acquire relations to one another (e.g., exclusions, where the part can stand for the whole, causal links), building the basis of a language.

5. Procedural streamlining

Recurrent instruction patterns harden into grammar—negotiated constraints and sequencing routines that make the “instructions to imagine” faster and more reliable.

Dor emphasizes that this technology is negotiated and prone to error and repair; this is what real-time technology looks like.

Real-world cases echo these dynamics. In Nicaraguan Sign Language, for example, beginning in the late 1970s, children built a new language across cohorts. Earlier cohorts established basic conventional signs, and later cohorts introduced grammatical devices that segment and recombine events more systematically. Similar development of the structure of sign language, for instance, is also documented for Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language. And of course, sign language has rules just as spoken language does.

These cases show communal anchoring, cohort-by-cohort generalization, and the crystallization of grammatical procedures, just what Dor’s book (and title)—”Instruction of the Imagination“—would predict for a socially engineered signal system and communication technology.

Individual Consciousness

This work of language building, of building shared meaning with language as an important byproduct, was inevitable. A shared external code of some kind, a public semantic code linking private experiences to each other, was really the only solution to solitude.

It was in this selection environment that individual traits that make people “better” contributors to the communal technology of shared meaning were selected. Some of the implicit evaluation criteria include: effective anchors; sensitivity to others’ attention and intentions; memory for conventions; rapid learning and generalization of these conventions; and fluency in applying them.

The pressures on our prehistoric human ancestors to construct shared meanings converged in ecological (territorial reach, dietary variety, etc.), social (group maintenance, teaching and learning, etc.), and sexual selection(communicative display, listener selectivity, etc.). This merging produced generations of human individuals increasingly ready to participate in, extend, and stabilize the shared code, or, again, the set of shared meanings, of a community.

Infant brains show specialized responses to human voices; they can distinguish the structure of speech from other signals long before they have any vocabulary or comprehension. When it comes to sight, human faces, bodies, and body parts, human movements, and gait are all attentionally prioritized. Even scenes of people interacting are selectively highlighted in the brain. Touch (stroking, caressing, holding, etc.) also plays an important role in transmitting communication.

With both social consciousness and individual consciousness in place, humans inherit two selves: a “we + me” communicative social self and a private self. Subjective awareness is the result of the social self communicating about its private experiences internally, or, more often, simply being automatically ready to do so.

The Purpose of Consciousness

Research on shared human intentionality and gene-culture coevolution thus suggests that social and individual consciousness together enabled human cultural evolution to develop in tandem with the biological evolution of the species. Children could now rapidly learn their culture’s shared code, but, much more importantly, consciousness enabled them to more rapidly learn their culture’s shared meanings, which are only partially represented in the society’s language. These shared meanings become important knowledgethat supports the tribe’s ability to survive and flourish. The human child comes ready to communicate and, thus, ready to contribute to those shared meanings.

Although many factors contribute to the success of Homo sapiens, the capacity for transmissive cultural teaching and learning, especially enabled and catalyzed by human consciousness, is a uniquely powerful factor in that success story. Paul L. Harris shows that humans learn almost everything they know from what epistemologists call “testimony”—learning from other humans, explicitly and communicatively. This includes learning about yourself and teaching others about who you think you are.


Children today learn voraciously, from language to the unwritten rules of playground games to the rhythms of popular music. As they grow older, they learn the shifting trends of dress and slang that define peer groups, how to behave on first dates, how to work at a first job, how to manage different identities (such as online versus offline personas), and how to cope with the loss of a loved one. This kind of knowledge simply cannot be had or shared without the presence and action of others, and it comprises a good deal of what we consider crucial to our lives.

The evidence, compiled across the literature and detailed in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies by Lynne Kelly, The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich, and The Prehistory of the Mind by Steven Mithen, suggests that knowledge transmission and storage were also very important in the lives of prehistoric humans. Transmissions (teachings) were crafted to be memorable. So they were represented in stories and couched in memorably fantastic myths, which were danced, sung, written, or drawn in various ways to ensure preservation from one generation to the next. Kelly also argues quite powerfully that neurodiversities such as autism, dyslexia, and ADHD have likely been with our species from the beginning of its cultural evolutionary journey, and provide significant benefits to variability in working with, maintaining, and transmitting verbal and spatial information within human culture.

Conclusion

Transmissive teaching and learning, which are the essence of cultural evolution, are our species’ superpower. And if that is the case, then human consciousness is the focus and form that this transmissive life inevitably takes. It is the capacity that allows meanings first exchanged between people to be carried forward, revisited, recombined, and answered for even in their absence.

There is very little mystery, in our view, as to why it emerges where meaning must be shared, preserved, and acted upon. When we understand these terms—teaching and learning—broadly, we see that they cover much more in our lives than “educating” narrowly defined. We transmit consolations and threats, and we offer congratulations and doubts; we explain, issue warnings, express commitments, and invite trust or resistance.


In doing so, we break out of our solitude. We come to know the world, ourselves, and others through meanings that did not originate with us, and we take action on that knowledge, for better or worse, within a web of shared expectations that long predates any single mind.

Author Bio: Josh Fisher is a writer and educational theorist whose work explores how human understanding emerges through shared practices and social coordination. Drawing on philosophy, psychology, cultural evolution theory, and the history of education, he examines a transmission-centered view of knowledge grounded in culture and collective meaning. He has more than three decades of experience developing curricula and has held senior roles in education publishing, where he helped design curriculum-integrated learning tools, including an AI tutor that improved student outcomes. He is a contributor to the Observatory.

Credit Line: This article was produced for the Observatory by the Independent Media Institute.

A Hard Offer To Refuse: Ukraine’s Strategic Pitch To A Middle East In Flux – Analysis

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud. Photo Credit: Ukraine Presidential Press Service

June 2, 2026
 Geopolitical Monitor
By Arthur Michelino

The dominant reading of Ukraine’s offer to Gulf states facing Iranian drone campaigns casts it as a diplomatic by-product of the conflict, a contingent opportunity that circumstance created and Kyiv was sensible enough to take.

That reading does not reach what is analytically most significant about what is occurring. It is difficult not to read what Kyiv is doing as the execution of a strategy built on a structural contradiction that the Iran war has made visible. Russia’s most important military partner in Ukraine is the same actor now threatening the infrastructure, investment climate, and soft power assets of the states that spent three years accommodating Russian capital. Russia has shown no capacity to protect those states from its own ally, and Ukraine, it turns out, is positioned to do precisely that. Ukraine is offering to do so without asking those states to account for the accommodation they extended. The Middle East has become a new front in the war between Kyiv and Moscow, and the current evidence suggests Ukraine is gaining ground on terms Moscow finds difficult to contest.

Iran is not a peripheral partner in Russia’s prosecution of the Ukraine war. The Shahed-136 loitering munition, developed in Iran, transferred to Moscow, and deployed at scale against Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure across thousands of documented strikes, has been one of the defining weapons of the conflict. Beyond receiving the weapon, Russia upgrades it, mass-produces its own Geran-2 variant incorporating jam-resistant navigation systems, and shares tactical improvements back with Iran. Open-source examination of drone debris recovered in the UAE confirmed the likely presence of Russian-manufactured Geran-2 units during Iran’s March 2026 campaign. Russian military satellites imaged Gulf military bases, including Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, in the days before Iranian strikes hit them. The available evidence suggests Russia was not neutral between its Gulf partners and its Iranian ally, and may have been actively helping Iran identify the infrastructure of states whose capital it had spent three years cultivating.

That same weapon system is what Ukraine has spent four years learning to defeat. No military on earth has accumulated more operationally validated experience against the Shahed. That experience, built at the cost of Ukrainian lives against the precise threat Gulf states are currently absorbing, is what is on the table, offered, notably, without asking those states to account for how they got here.

The Gulf Neutrality That Made Sense

Gulf neutrality was a coherent position, and the force of what Ukraine is now offering cannot be grasped without understanding why.

The UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar declined alignment with the post-February 2022 Western sanctions regime for reasons that, at the time, held together analytically. Multipolarity was arriving regardless of the Ukraine conflict’s outcome. Early positioning as neutral commercial and diplomatic hubs within the emerging architecture offered long-term dividends in capital flows and optionality that alignment with either bloc would have foreclosed. Western pressure was itself a form of coercion that Gulf states had structural and historical reasons to resist. Russia offered something with genuine value. The suggestion that declining to join the Western punitive coalition would purchase insulation from great power disruption was credible. Gulf states took it.

The UAE expressed this calculation most completely. Russian capital flight found its primary destination in Dubai. Its financial system provided liquidity to Russian entities excluded from Western banking. Its sovereign investment architecture maintained simultaneous relationships across both Western and Russian-aligned networks. Active, profitable multipolarity is what it amounted to, and for a period it was precisely what it appeared to be.

Qatar expressed the same logic through a different instrument, leveraging LNG export relationships with European buyers as protection against Western political pressure. Saudi Arabia managed oil pricing in ways that frustrated Washington without formally rupturing the alliance architecture. The shared premise across all three postures was that the Russia-West confrontation was a European problem, that Gulf interests lay in remaining indispensable to both sides, and that Iranian behavior, while a persistent concern, was manageable through existing deterrence frameworks.

Iran’s escalatory campaign does more than complicate that premise. It has the effect of dismantling its structural foundations.

The Iranian Ally That Cannot Be Managed

What Iran’s campaign attacks is not the periphery of Gulf strategy but its operating premises. The investment thesis underpinning Gulf modernization, the soft power infrastructure through which Gulf states project global relevance, and the financial confidence that sovereign wealth accumulation requires are all targets of a sustained coercive effort. More than 2,000 Shahed-type drones entered the Gulf region in the first weeks of the campaign alone. A significant share of strikes on the UAE hit civilian infrastructure, including residential areas, airports, and the Government Media Office in Umm Al Quwain. Iranian drone and missile campaigns targeting data centers, energy installations, and logistics corridors are introducing a level of systemic uncertainty that investment prospectuses are not built to absorb indefinitely.

Gulf states have spent the past decade converting sovereign wealth into global cultural legitimacy through mega-events, infrastructure investment, and the cultivation of reputations as stable destinations for mobile capital and talent. Iranian coercive capacity directed at that infrastructure places the entire project under what looks, for now, like permanent uncertainty. Gulf monarchies under sustained Iranian fire want Iran’s capacity to launch such campaigns permanently reduced before accepting any end to the conflict. States that believed their current security arrangements were adequate would not be making such demands.

Against any of these pressures, Russia has no protection to offer. The structural dependency that the Ukraine warhas created between Moscow and Tehran precludes any positioning as a counterweight to Iranian pressure in the Gulf. When the United Nations Security Council voted on a Bahrain-led resolution condemning Iranian attacks on Gulf states, Moscow abstained rather than block it outright. When a second Gulf-submitted resolution aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz came to a vote on April 7, Russia vetoed it. The move from abstention to active veto follows the deepening of the Russia-Iran dependency as the conflict developed. To protect the shipping lanes that Gulf states themselves had asked the Council to reopen was a step Moscow would not take. The call Putin made to Gulf leaders on March 2, seeking to position himself as a mediator, elicited from Mohammed bin Salman the assessment, recorded in the Kremlin’s official readout, that Russia could play a positive, stabilizing role. That is, one might note, the diplomatic language reserved for interlocutors regarded as useful for communication and irrelevant for protection. The implicit guarantee that underpinned Gulf neutrality has, in practice, proven structurally hollow, produced by the logic of the Russia-Iran axis itself and deepened by four years of Ukraine war dependency.

The Non-Judgmental Offer

Since 2022, Western offers of security assistance to Gulf states have arrived with conditions attached, and in this they have fared no better than Russia’s own engagement. Gulf states are asked to align on Ukraine, meet democratic governance standards, accept human rights conditionality, and divest from Russian assets. The pattern has been resisted successfully and repeatedly, not because Gulf states lack the capacity to understand what is being asked, but because the framing activates a defensive response that forecloses the engagement before it can begin. External moral pressure in Gulf capitals produces defensive nationalism, not receptive recalibration.

In Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha, the Ukrainian offer for assistance arrived without political conditions. Zelenskyy’s framing was consistent across all three stops, centered on readiness to share expertise and systems, readiness to work together to strengthen the protection of lives. There was no demand that Gulf states account for their Russian accommodation, no invocation of moral debt, no hierarchy in which Ukraine’s suffering establishes a claim on Gulf political behavior. The more explicit framing Zelenskyy reserved for his address to the UK Parliament in London never appeared in Riyadh or Doha. There, in his Westminster address to MPs on March 17, he told them directly that the regimes in Russia and Iran were ‘brothers in hatred’, and that this was why they were brothers in weapons. The register shifted depending on the audience. The offer to the Gulf was capability without judgment. That calibration was deliberate.

That the offer generated a coordinated Russia-Iran disinformation campaign, including fabricated claims that Iranian missiles had destroyed Ukrainian military bases in Dubai and that Ukraine constituted a legitimate target for Iranian strikes, is itself evidence of how it was perceived. A security offer that no one took seriously would not have required a counteroperation. Ukraine’s foreign ministry spokesperson subsequently refuted the campaign officially. The operation’s existence is, among other things, a measure of the offer’s perceived reach.

What Ukraine is offering is an ecosystem spanning every layer of the defense problem Gulf states face. Counter-drone interceptors costing between three and five thousand dollars each, electronic warfare systems, maritime drones, software, mesh sensor networks, AI-assisted targeting, and the training and co-production infrastructure to build indigenous capability over time form the core of what is being transferred. The 10-year timeframe reflects that scope, built on the calculation that the Iranian threat is more structural than episodic, and that the defense partnership being constructed is designed to outlast the current conflict. “Simple sales do not interest us,”Zelenskyy said. The offer amounts, in practice, to the transfer of a system.

228 Ukrainian anti-drone experts are already deployed across five countries, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and Jordan, operating against live Iranian attacks. Bahrain has since entered the same track, with Zelenskyy’s May 5 visit to Manama producing proposals to open reciprocal embassies and conclude a Drone Deal with King Hamad, with both delegations agreed to work out the details. Interest from at least 11 additional countries has been confirmed. Patriot and THAAD systems were designed for ballistic missile threats and are firing multimillion-dollar interceptors at drones costing tens of thousands. Ukraine’s layered approach, using truck-mounted guns, cheap interceptor drones, jamming, and constantly iterated tactics, addresses the cost asymmetry that makes Iranian drone campaigns strategically sustainable. When Zelenskyy said “in terms of expertise, no one today can help the way Ukraine can,” Ukraine remains the only government with a mass-produced, combat-proven system specifically designed to counter Iranian and Russian mass-drone attacks. The operational record suggests he was not overstating the case.

The UAE: Capital, Infrastructure, and the Limits of Neutrality

No Gulf state sits more awkwardly in this picture than the United Arab Emirates.

More Russian capital flowed into the UAE post-2022 than into any other Gulf state. Dubai’s real estate market, its financial intermediary infrastructure, and its jurisdictional positioning as a sanctions-resistant hub absorbed Russian wealth seeking insulation from Western enforcement. Russians were the largest single group of non-resident property buyers by mid-2022. The accommodation was commercially profitable and, within the framework of Gulf neutrality, strategically rational. The network of relationships it created has, in the event, offered no protection.

The UAE has simultaneously staked its long-horizon development strategy on becoming a global hub for AI infrastructure and digital capital. That bet requires above all a security environment in which long-horizon investors can place assets with confidence. Targeting the UAE is what a significant share of Iranian drone strikes in the opening days of the campaign did, including strikes on data centers and critical infrastructure, despite Abu Dhabi’s refusal to allow its territory to be used as a launchpad for the US-Israeli operations. The neutrality that was supposed to purchase protection has, in practice, purchased nothing of the kind. Russian satellites reportedly identified the targets. Russian tactical advice appears to have contributed to the precision of the strikes.

Among the actors capable of addressing these pressures, the distinctions are sharp. Washington can, but at a political price Abu Dhabi has consistently declined to pay. Russia has shown no capacity to address any dimension of them. Ukraine can address the specific operational dimension, without conditions, at the precise moment when the political cost of accepting is lowest because the offer arrives without the judgment that would make acceptance feel like realignment. The UAE defense cooperation agreement is currently being finalized.

Saudi Arabia: Where Every Vulnerability Converges

Saudi Arabia is where the full range of Gulf vulnerabilities converges.

The oil pricing posture that frustrated Washington throughout the Ukraine war reflected the same multipolarity calculation as the UAE’s capital accommodation. Riyadh managed OPEC+ output in ways that benefited Russian revenues, declined to join the Western sanctions architecture, and positioned the Kingdom as an indispensable node in both Western and Russian-aligned energy systems. That posture bought optionality, though protection from the ally whose weapons Saudi Arabia now faces appears not to have been part of what it purchased.

What that posture did not insulate is the soft power project layered on top of it. The 2034 FIFA World Cup is the temporal anchor of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 soft power strategy. Confirmed by FIFA in December 2024, it is the capstone of a years-long effort to convert sovereign wealth into global cultural legitimacy and to establish the Kingdom as a destination for talent, investment, and international institutional presence. The tournament requires a stable, internationally legible security environment for another eight years. Iranian coercive capacity directed at Saudi infrastructure places that project under permanent uncertainty. Zelenskyy stated on March 28 that Russian satellites had imaged Prince Sultan Air Base in the days before Iranian strikes hit it. Formula One cancelled its Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grand Prix races in April 2026 on safety grounds, creating a five-week gap in the season calendar. These are not peripheral disruptions. For a country betting its long-horizon legitimacy on projecting stability, they are close to the center.

It is hard to see how the state whose satellite data reportedly helped Iran identify Saudi targets can position itself as a security partner for the Kingdom’s most consequential long-horizon project. Saudi Arabia signed an Arrangement on Defense Cooperation with Ukraine on March 27, providing the foundation for future contracts, technological cooperation, and investment. Zelenskyy described the cooperation as mutually beneficial, and the reciprocity is specific. Ukraine is seeking PAC-3 interceptor missiles for its Patriot air defense systems, a year-long diesel supplyagreement for its military and agricultural operations, and financial support for its defense industry. Saudi Arabia is acquiring combat-tested drone expertise and systems it cannot obtain elsewhere without political conditions attached. The exchange appears clean on both sides, with no moral conditions visibly attached on either end.

The relationship is not without its tensions. Ukraine is simultaneously offering air defense expertise to Gulf states and competing with them for scarce Patriot interceptor stocks. Zelenskyy noted the point directly: every PAC-3 firedin the Middle East is one fewer Ukraine can acquire. That both sides proceed despite this competition is, if anything, further evidence that the exchange is a genuine transaction and not a diplomatic gesture.

Qatar and the Mediation Pivot

European dependence on Qatari gas has long produced diplomatic insulation, with buyers structurally disinclined to pressure Doha on political questions. That insulation protected Doha’s neutrality throughout the Ukraine warmore effectively than any formal security guarantee could have provided, and it generated a specific role as mediator and back-channel in multiple regional conflicts, one that depends on all parties perceiving Doha as genuinely neutral and genuinely indispensable.

The progressive development of American LNG export capacity and West African LNG supply as credible alternatives erodes this protection. As European buyers acquire alternatives, the leverage Doha exercises over its principal diplomatic cover diminishes, and the need for alternative instruments of strategic autonomy increases precisely as the most reliable one weakens.

A state under sustained drone and missile attack struggles to project the stable, balanced neutrality that effective mediation requires. Years of quiet diplomatic work have built Doha a reputation that Iranian strikes now threaten most directly. The physical and the diplomatic are not separate dimensions here. Qatar’s mediation capacity depends on the perception of Doha as a stable, insulated space. Every strike on Gulf infrastructure, every cancelled international event, every upward revision of the regional risk premium erodes precisely that perception.

What Ukraine is offering Qatar is the protection of the operational precondition for Qatar’s most distinctive strategic asset, a function that exceeds what conventional air defense arrangements are designed to deliver. A defense cooperation agreement with Ukraine was signed on March 28, providing for joint defense industry projects, co-production facilities, and technological partnerships, with discussions also covering the possible acquisition of Mirage fighter jets. The agreement is, among other things, an admission about what the existing arrangements do not cover. Qatar’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that Iranian missile attacks targeted Hamad International Airport on March 2, with Qatari air defenses engaging the incoming threats, and the Ministry of Defense reported the interception of an Iranian aerial attack involving two Su-24 aircraft, seven ballistic missiles, and five drones on the same day. The strategic position this produces is structurally costly: a state whose mediation identity depends on projecting stable neutrality has been drawn into direct engagement against the actor its neutrality was supposed to manage.

Syria: Decoupling Without Ambiguity

In Syria, the surface has already broken. The Gulf cases involve decoupling that is incremental, deniable, and expressed through the reorientation of security relationships beneath a maintained surface of multipolarity. Syria offers something the Gulf cases cannot. The same mechanism operates here without disguise, at a more advanced stage, in a country where Russian presence was not financial but military and political.

For over a decade the country hosted Russian military bases, aircraft, and naval assets while its previous government openly supported Moscow’s framing of the Ukraine war, a posture rather different from the quiet hedging of Gulf states. Russian and Iranian military intervention kept Assad in power through the civil war years. His fall in December 2024 cost Moscow its most significant military foothold in the Middle East, lost not through Western pressure but through the collapse of the political structure it had sustained at considerable cost. The pattern that produced this outcome is consistent enough to be worth naming. When partners need protection, Moscow issues statements. Armenia, Syria, Venezuela, Iran all appear to have tested that pattern and found it held.

Into that space Ukraine arrived, through Turkish facilitation. Ankara’s access and credibility were what Zelenskyy needed to reach al-Sharaa, and the trilateral format that resulted, Ukraine, Syria, and Turkey, reflects that dependency. What Damascus brings to the exchange is different from what Riyadh or Doha brought. Syria has no advanced air defenses capable of dealing with Iranian drones or missiles, and its weapons are all Russian. The offer being extended reads as an offer to help Syria progressively replace that military dependency with partnerships that do not carry Moscow’s political weight. Speaking at Chatham House on March 31, al-Sharaa announced that Russia’s bases at Tartus and Khmeimim are to be transformed into Syrian army training centers. What fills that vacancy, in doctrine, equipment, and expertise, is the question Ukraine is now positioned to help answer.

Russia lost Syria politically when Assad fell and is at risk of losing it militarily not through confrontation but through the patient substitution of its presence by actors, Ukraine among them, who arrived when Moscow’s position became untenable. The offer in Damascus operates on the same terms as the offer in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. No recrimination for the past, only capability for the present. That the logic holds across contexts as different as Gulf financial hubs and a post-civil war state rebuilding its military from scratch suggests a structural pattern, not contingent on circumstance.

What the Decoupling Looks Like

That offer, repeated across the Gulf and now in Damascus, is the mechanism through which Russia’s position across the Middle East is being weakened. The weakening does not take a uniform form. In the Gulf it is quiet, incremental, and deniable at every stage, expressed through the reorientation of security relationships beneath a maintained surface of multipolarity. In Syria the process is already more explicit, driven by the structural collapse of the political architecture Russian intervention had sustained. In both cases what is shifting is the underlying calculus of which external actors regional states regard as capable of delivering meaningful protection.

The downgrading coexists with a short-term financial windfall. Higher oil prices from the Strait of Hormuz closure doubled Russian oil revenues in the first three weeks of the campaign, providing Moscow with short-term financial relief from a budget crisis that had been deepening since 2024. The windfall and the erosion of Russia’s regional network coexist without contradiction. Extracting revenue from a situation one cannot shape is, historically, the profile of a declining power managing its descent. The current Russian position in the Middle East fits that description.

What declining power looks like in Gulf behavior is correspondingly modest. Gulf states will not expel Russian capital or join Western sanctions regimes. Condemnations of Moscow’s conduct in Ukraine will not be forthcoming. What will shift, quietly and over time, is the direction of new security partnerships, the source of defense technology co-production, and the underlying calculus of protection.

The diplomatic state of play reinforces the calculation. The Pakistan-brokered ceasefire of early April has since produced no resolution, only a prolonged dual blockade stalemate, with the US Navy imposing a counter-blockade on Iranian ports from April 13 and Iran keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed to US allies. Iranian drone attacks on Gulf infrastructure continued during the nominal ceasefire period, with the UAE reporting strikes as recently as May 4. On May 25, a senior US administration official confirmed that a framework had been agreed extending the ceasefire by 60 days and reopening the Strait of Hormuz while a final settlement is negotiated. Iran has not dismantled the coercive capacity that produced the campaign. A deal that contains rather than eliminates that capacity is precisely the structural condition the security partnerships being built are designed to outlast.

Russia’s position in that calculus is being downgraded across the region, by accumulation rather than persuasion. Gulf states have not been convinced that Moscow is wrong. They have simply watched a sequence of events that makes the question of conviction increasingly beside the point. The reliable partner brand appears to have rested on a single structural premise, that partnership with Moscow offered insulation from external disruption without political conditions. Satellite data reportedly provided by Russia helped Iran identify targets in Gulf states, and Russian vetoes at the Security Council protected Tehran from resolutions that Gulf states themselves had submitted. When Iran’s foreign minister Araghchi flew to St. Petersburg on April 27, after failing to secure US talks, Putin met him alongside Lavrov and the GRU chief and pledged to do everything that serves Iran’s interests “and the interests of all the people of the region.” When diplomacy stalls for Iran, the next stop is Moscow. What that sequence of facts has destroyed is unlikely to be repaired through diplomacy. The same mechanism, working in reverse, is upgrading Ukraine’s position in the regional security calculus.

Gulf states have not been persuaded that Kyiv is right. They have identified something they urgently need and found it available without the conditions that would make acceptance costly. The 10-year agreements with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the finalizing agreement with the UAE, the 228 experts already in the field across five countries, the ecosystem of doctrine and co-production being constructed, all of it has the structure of security relationships designed to outlast the current conflict. Gulf states are building a broader multi-alignment procurement model across multiple partners. Ukraine’s position within that model rests on a specific and non-replicable advantage: no other partner has spent four years learning to defeat the precise weapon now threatening Gulf infrastructure.

Conclusion

The connection between these facts is the one Ukraine has chosen not to name. Four years of operationally validated knowledge against the weapon that Russia’s ally built and Russia’s satellites reportedly helped aim is being offered to the states that Russia’s diplomacy cultivated and the country that Russia’s military sustained, without asking any of them to acknowledge it.

Russia cannot make an equivalent offer. Its own military partner is the threat it cannot protect Gulf states from, its satellites reportedly helped identify their targets, and it vetoed the Security Council resolutions Gulf states themselves had submitted. Washington can make an equivalent offer, but not without the compliance conditions Gulf states have spent years resisting. Ukraine’s offer arrives without any of that, grounded in operational experience no other actor possesses, extended without judgment to states and governments whose prior relationships with Moscow Ukraine has chosen not to name.

That choice, whatever its ultimate design, is hard to read as accidental. A country fighting for its survival appears to be using the internal contradictions of its adversary’s alliance architecture to progressively loosen the network of relationships that Moscow spent years building across the Middle East. The process is incremental in the Gulf and already more structurally advanced in Syria. In both cases it is the same offer, calibrated to what each recipient can accept. Whether it constitutes a deliberate strategy or an opportunistic reading of circumstances that others created, the direction of the movement is identifiable from the pattern of agreements already in place.

This article was published by Geopolitical Monitor.com