The Ukrainian ruling class has quickly seized upon the criminal United States war against Iran to strengthen its own domestic defense industry and garner support from the Gulf states in its ongoing NATO-backed war against Russia.
On Saturday, just a day after announcing a defense agreement with Saudi Arabia, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made an unannounced visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to meet with Emirati President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and discuss Ukraine’s military cooperation with the UAE, specifically its drone warfare capabilities, which the NATO-backed country has employed extensively in its own war with Moscow.
Regarding the meeting, Zelensky wrote on his social media accounts that he and Al Nahyan had “agreed to cooperate in the field of security and defense. Our teams will finalize the details.”
A day earlier, Zelensky met with Amir of the State of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. Following the meeting, the Chiefs of the General Staff of Ukraine and the State of Qatar signed a 10-year intergovernmental agreement on cooperation in the defense sector. “Key areas of cooperation include the development of the defense industry and technologies, air defense, counter-drone capabilities, military training, exchange of experience, cybersecurity, AI, and command and control systems,” a statement from the Ukraine president’s office said.
In exchange, Ukraine will receive huge funds to develop its own arms industry and drone production for the war against Russia, and access to foreign technology. Ukraine has also secured a year-long diesel supply deal. It is reportedly also trying to gain access to high-grade air defense systems held by the Gulf states.
The military collaboration between Ukraine and the brutal authoritarian regimes in the Gulf to aid the imperialist war of aggression against Iran not only gives the lie, once again, to the NATO propaganda which portrayed the war against Russia in Ukraine as a war in defense of “democracy.” Above all, it makes clear that, essentially, both wars are part of a global conflict, in which the fronts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East are closely interlinked.
Even as Zelensky has attacked the Trump administration for its temporary lifting of oil sanctions on Russia and “insufficient” pressure on Russia, the Ukrainian oligarchy is proving itself a willing enabler and beneficiary of the blatantly criminal war on Iran.
While Zelensky and the Western imperialist press have pitched the deals as simply “defense” cooperation, in reality, Ukraine has used military drones extensively to carry out offensive attacks, assassinations and other terror operations within Russia against both military and civilian targets.
On Sunday, Kiev carried out a drone attack at the major Russian oil export terminal of the Ust-Luga facility, on the southern shores of the Gulf of Finland near St. Petersburg.
According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, Ukraine launched more than 345 drones overnight at Russian targets nationwide and 31 drones were downed over the Leningrad region as part of the attack.
It remains unclear from where exactly Ukraine was firing the drones. However, military analysts estimate that Ukraine likely sent the drones from within Ukrainian territory over 935 kilometers away, underlining the increasingly vast distances from which drone technologies are being deployed. Last year, Ukrainian drones hit Russian airfields deep inside Siberia.
Apart from being used in military operations on the battlefield, drones are being used to attack and damage critical infrastructure such as energy plants, dams, oil refineries, electrical substations and more.
The individuals inevitably killed in such attacks while manning these facilities on 24/7 schedules are not soldiers, but workers with no stake in an expanding world war that threatens all of humanity.
Earlier on Saturday morning, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that a total of 155 Ukrainian drones were intercepted overnight across 17 regions, predominantly in the western part of the country.
Regarding the attacks, Yaroslavl Governor Mikhail Yevrayev wrote on Telegram that “One child was killed, who was in one of the private residential buildings in a rural area ... His parents were hospitalized in serious condition.”
According to official figures from November 2025, 7,715 civilians have died in Russia since the beginning of the war in February 2022, many of them as a result of drone attacks. Over 17,000 were wounded. The number has no doubt significantly increased since.
The essential role of drones in modern warfare first came to prominence in the 2020 war between Azerbaijan, backed by the US and Turkey, and a Moscow-backed Armenia. Even before, the US utilized drones extensively throughout its 20-year failed war in Afghanistan to carry out targeted assassinations. However, the 44-day war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagarno-Karabakh region signaled a new stage in warfare with large numbers of soldiers killed by unmanned aerial drones.
The Ukrainian ruling class, observing this development, quickly moved to initiate a close collaboration with NATO-member Turkey to expand its drone capabilities prior to the beginning of the NATO-backed proxy war in February 2022.
In early February 2022, Zelensky met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey in Kiev. The two NATO-backed presidents signed a free trade agreement, and Ukrainian officials touted a deal to produce Turkish-designed Bayraktar TB2 aerial drones in Ukraine.
Ukraine had first deployed the drones against pro-Russian separatists in East Ukraine in October 2022, even though their use was prohibited by a ceasefire and the 2015 Minsk Accords. The use of the weapon at the time marked a significant escalation in the nearly eight-year-long civil war that had begun in the wake of the Western-backed coup in Kiev in February 2014.
In the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, Turkish-backed Azerbaijan also employed such drones and was able to achieve a surprise victory over a Russian-backed Armenia. The outcome of that war was likely a factor in the decision of the oligarchic Putin regime to move forward with a full-scale war before Kiev achieved military superiority over the pro-Russian separatists in East Ukraine.
Over the past four years, Ukraine’s defense industry has been making immense profits off a war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian working class soldiers.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense touted at the recent Munich Security Conference that the defense industry’s “[p]roduction capacity has indeed grown exponentially. In 2022, it was estimated at approximately $1 billion. A year later, it had risen to $3–6 billion. In 2024, estimates ranged from $10 [billion] to $20 billion annually. In 2025, the figure reached $35 billion, and in 2026 it is expected to total at least $50–55 billion.”