Name: Could Ukraine be benefitting from the Iran war? | DW News
Uploaded: 2026-03-30T16:58:13.000Z
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Could the war in Iran benefit Ukraine in its battle against Russia?

Since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine has become expert at fending off drones fired by Russia but designed in Iran.

Participle clauses

Known as Shaheds, they're a key weapon in Russia's war of aggression.

Over the last few days, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been touring the Gulf States, meeting leaders who are themselves now facing drone attacks from Iran.

He has discussed a security pact with Jordan's King Abdullah and has signed defense agreements with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and

Kyiv is offering to share its air defense expertise and drone technology.

Zelenskyy is also looking for support in the Middle East to cover Ukraine's budget deficit and to fund weapons production.

Anatoly Motkin says the Iran war has, quote, "shown a spotlight on Ukraine's emergence as a drone superpower." He's the president of the Strategist Center for a New Economy, a nonprofit based in the US that aims to develop knowledge-driven economies in the Eurasian region.

Ukraine is now helping Gulf countries defend themselves against Iranian drone attacks.

How is it doing that, considering it has its own war to fight?

First, thank you first for inviting me here today.

And it's true that Ukraine has its own war to fight today.

But also, Ukraine, I think, has today a unique data and expertise on how to respond to challenges like Shahed drones that you have just mentioned, and

to do it not with the overexpensive tools like THAAD or Patriot missiles.

And I think that's the main experience that Ukraine could deliver to the Gulf.

We should remember that Ukraine, even before the war, we're talking about an ecosystem that consists of over 300,000 engineers, high-level engineers, who provide digital services without all Fortune 500 companies without exception.

And just the full-scale invasion forced most of those companies to start developing dual technologies or defense technologies.

So it's not that people who used to work in other different domains decided because of the invasion to become engineers and to start developing those defense technologies.

They just had to develop new technologies to defend themselves.

Now, during his trip to the Gulf, President Zelenskyy, it's true, the countries that you mentioned are Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Emirates, but

So these are five countries that are actually in this loop.

And I think that today, those countries in the Gulf, they experience exactly what Ukraine experiences for the last four years.

They need to defend their strategic infrastructure, and

they need to defend not only the military bases, as Iran claims, but

also the civil population there, both the local citizens and also the visitors to those countries.

And for some countries like Qatar and Emirates, the non-residents are actually the majority, right?

I think that Ukraine could deliver this specific experience.

And we saw, I think, during the last months many footages about the interceptor drones developed in Ukraine.

So I heard yesterday the CEO of Rheinmetall, Mr.

Papperger, saying that the Ukrainian tech industry is mainly housewives with 3D printers.

It's true that many components are printed on 3D printers, but

the way how Ukrainians integrate their advanced technologies with the new-developed technologies, and

also how they reshape those technologies on a daily basis because, unfortunately for Ukraine, but

It's also Russians developing their new technologies.

So it's actually the cat and the mouse, right?

So seeing what we see on the battlefield in Ukraine, we'll also see that Russians provide their adjusted drones.

So in the first stage, at the very beginning, Iran was providing Shahed drones to Russia.

Now, in Tatarstan, Russians are developing their new adopted versions of Shahed drones, and

So Ukraine is providing their new technologies to the Gulf.

We saw that the Ukrainian tech sector and the Gulf countries started developing their, let's say, collaboration in the tech sector several years ago, even before the war.

And I'm happy that, despite the war, Ukraine has an ability also to send their experts.

And we know that some of the Ukrainian experts already are deployed in the Gulf States to assist the local military to adopt their interceptor system and ability to the nowadays needs.

Motkin, you've made so many important points that I just want to take the time and go through some of them one by one.

Ukraine was not always a superpower at blocking drone attacks.

Can you walk us through how they've developed this defense expertise?

So as I started, Ukraine was always a technologically or engineering-advanced country.

Even before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian engineers were the main, let's say, engineering force or one of the main engineering forces in the Soviet Union.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian engineers started providing digital solutions to American companies and European companies.

And after some time, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, Ukrainians also started developing their successful product companies.

Today, we have about 1,000 unicorns made in Ukraine.

And after the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian engineers actually, it was a matter of survival, right?

They started thinking how they could use their engineering thought to protect their own country.

And moreover, at the very beginning of the war, the war started on the Russian side in a very not-sophisticated way, with the 20th-century missiles, 20th-century tanks, 20th-century cannons.

And Ukraine started with Bayraktar drones that they actually purchased from Turkey.

And that's something that actually, Russians were quite surprised.

And the first initial wave of the Russian offensive against Ukraine actually was blocked partially by those drones.

And when Ukrainians discovered this ability to use new technologies, even against what Russians were calling themselves the second army in the world, they understood that they needed to scale it up.

And then the government created the demand.

The Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine and the person his name is Mikhail Fedorov.

He used to be Minister of Digital Development of Ukraine.

And several months ago, he was appointed to become Minister of Defense of Ukraine.

So he was the mastermind behind this initiative to create incentives for the private sector and not for the government or the governmental production plans to develop whatever they think is the right thing to do or the right products to do.

Moreover, to avoid the bureaucracy, the tech sector in Ukraine is still and from the scratch, they're communicating directly with the brigades, those who are fighting at the front line.

So the speed that they get the feedback from the fighters is literally sometimes hours, sometimes days, definitely not weeks and months.

And that's how they actually are able to adjust and to adopt their products on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, to the needs of the combat units.

And what I actually understand from the tech guys there in Ukraine and also from the military guys there, the lifecycle of any technological solution on the battlefield is maximum four months.

So it takes you to plan it four months in a traditional way, as it has been done in the 20th century.

It's not relevant at the day it's been produced.

You've written that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and

their Gulf region neighbors have been studying the Ukrainian experience.

They could learn, first, adaptability and how to, let's say, foster the development of the new technologies, and

also how to make all this production line, including the adoption of the new circumstances or new data, and

Some of the solutions that Ukrainians have, they also got from getting the first Shahed drone that was not exploded.

They hacked also both software and hardware.

And they took the technology, and they knew also how to defeat those drones for the next time.

Also, they know how to work with the new advanced technologies developed by Palantir or Unreal or the most advanced AI companies in the US, how they could also manage not a single drone but swarms of drones, and

how it could be self-managed when they're sending those drones and not necessarily the operator should keep operating them.

So I think that the first thing they could teach the Gulf, their, let's say, friends or associates or colleagues from the Gulf is actually what is the nature of the new warfare, both electronic warfare and the drone warfare.

Don't forget that Ukrainians one-handedly succeeded to make the Russian Black Sea fleet flee from the Black Sea.

There is no such thing anymore as a Russian Black Sea fleet.

And they're doing something similar also in the Azov Sea.

And I think that that's something that could be very useful for the Gulf States, first, how they could save lives of their soldiers and still keep fighting against regional aggression;

second, how they could protect themselves and protect the critical infrastructure in their countries based on cheap technologies.

Just to let you know that each missile of Patriot, it's millions of dollars.

Each interceptor drone that is able to take down the Russian drone is about $6,000.