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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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