As Iran’s drones swarm Gulf, Ukraine’s wartime tech lands billion-dollar deals

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday that his country had “undoubtedly changed the geopolitical situation” in the Middle East with a series of decade-long defence agreements with Gulf states being hit with Iranian drones and missiles.

Has he? And how important are the agreements for Ukraine, more than four years into the Russian invasion and facing its own maelstrom of military, economic and diplomatic challenges?

The Ukrainian leader has been on a whirlwind tour of the Gulf in recent days – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar – touting what he calls Kyiv’s world-leading air defences.

Ukraine has developed a suite of tools to fend off nightly Russian drone attacks, chief among them cheap and highly effective drone-on-drone interceptors.

Moscow’s attack drones are based on the Iranian Shaheds now being fired by Tehran across the region – strikes it says are retaliation for US-Israeli air attacks on Iran.

Zelensky has sought to craft an opportunity from the war, which otherwise benefits Russia through higher oil prices and possible slowdowns in Western arms supplies to Kyiv.