The bloody conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are converging and becoming even more dangerous
The Times View
July 27, 2026
The Times
President Zelensky is on the road again. This week the Ukrainian leader is in Britain to persuade Andy Burnham to agree to a long-term drone research and production pact, and shortly afterwards in Washington to bring Donald Trump around to the idea that he should be tougher with Vladimir Putin. His most persuasive argument in both these sensible causes is that the defence of Kyiv and the defence of free passage in the Strait of Hormuz are fronts on the same extended battlefield against the world’s autocrats.
Like it or not, says Mr. Zelensky, there is a strategic overlap between the two fierce wars. It is no coincidence, after all, that the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is also in the United States this week. In his travel bag, Mr. Zelensky brings information that he hopes will convince the US president that the dots should be joined.
First, by striking an Iranian arms shipment in the Caspian Sea destined for Russia, the Ukrainians have demonstrated that Moscow and Tehran are in cahoots, and that Kyiv can dismember a supply chain that has become crucial to current wars. Second, Ukraine wants to present evidence that Russia has been mapping US airbases in the Middle East — including Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait — and then passing on the information to Tehran. The two countries, in other words, are integrating target acquisition, a very sophisticated level of military collaboration. Russia is trading satellite intelligence, guidance algorithms and electronic warfare systems in return for Iranian drones and weaponry.
Mr Zelensky’s message has to be taken seriously. Russia and Iran have become more than allies: they are jointly collaborating in military technology. Russia uses adapted Shahed 136 drones from Iran against Ukrainian cities and backs up these deadly swarms with anti-jamming navigation and decoys. These systems, having been road-tested against Ukraine, are then fed back into the Middle East conflict when Iran attacks the Gulf states for their supposed alignment with the US.
The US president may suspect that Mr Zelensky is simply striving to make himself continually relevant to Washington. He may even believe that the Ukrainian leader, struggling to stay in control of his country’s war management and its war economy, is trying to pull the wool over his eyes. But Mr Zelensky’s fears are real enough. Mr Trump’s eagerness to delegate the Ukraine war to his European allies, in order to focus on Hormuz, may shred his previous promises to Kyiv. At Nato’s recent Ankara summit, the US promised American licences for Ukraine to manufacture Patriot missile components locally. Ukrainian cities desperately need air defence;
Mr Zelensky makes the case that the battle over Ukrainian skies is redesigning the war in the Middle East. It is therefore a Trump promise worth keeping.
Mr Zelensky’s demands of Mr Burnham are more modest. They include contributions to air defence systems, electronic warfare jamming kit — or at least the intellectual property rights to this tech so that Kyiv can build its own — and countermining training programmes in the Black Sea. These are not unreasonable requests. The prime minister should not need the kind of persuasion being applied to a sceptical US administration. But Mr Zelensky is surely in his rights to ask whether Mr Burnham, his new friend in Downing Street, intends to commit to serious defence-spending targets to end the slaughter of Ukrainian civilians.
The British too would be happy to hear the answer. So far, there has been only vagueness from Mr. Burnham and his new government, at a time of dangerously entangled wars, as to whether the government will meet its Nato promise to spend 3 per cent of GDP by 2030, let alone approach 3.5 per cent by 2035. Leadership, in war as in peace, demands that clarity.