The war that began in Ukraine has spread to the Gulf and now threatens to reach "sleepy, barely defended Britain" itself, the New Statesman has warned in a major dispatch from the front line, as cited by "Hvylya".
The New Statesman's Will Lloyd, reporting from Kyiv and Kharkiv Oblast in February, described a conflict that has metastasized far beyond Ukraine's borders. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu launched their war on Iran shortly after Lloyd returned from Ukraine. Iranian Shaheds - the same drones Ukrainians had endured for four years of nightly terror - began raining down across the Gulf, with rumors they were being mass-produced in China.
The consequences were immediate and global. Damage to energy storage, terminals, refineries, and pipelines around the region "threatened to plunge the world into another recession, toppling governments, immiserating millions." Trump, taken aback by the violent efficiency of the Iranian counterattack, was demanding a Western armada enter the Gulf. Turkey, sitting directly between Ukraine and Iran, risked being pulled in.
The Iranian-made Shahed-136 - specimens of which now hang in a small occupation museum in the liberated city of Izyum - was already menacing British forces in Cyprus. What had started as a Ukrainian air defense problem had become a threat to the entire Western security architecture.
Ukrainian author Oleksandr Mykhed had framed the danger in blunt terms during a meeting in Kyiv, warning Lloyd that Westerners who saw the war as nearing its conclusion were fundamentally misreading the situation. The conflict was not winding down - it was spreading. He wanted to know whether Europeans understood what was coming. Ukrainians would survive, he argued - they always did. "But would Europeans when the war came for them?"
The war had already "pulled the US and Europe apart, invented a whole new machinery of death, underlined our dependence on brutal petro-states, flooded this corner of eastern Europe with several generations' worth of weapons." Expensive munitions for advanced air defense platforms were running low and needed everywhere from Kyiv to Tel Aviv to Abu Dhabi. As Lloyd wrote: "They would learn what it felt like to be Ukrainian."
Also read: Foreign Affairs: Britain, Not Brussels, Holds the Key to Europe's Security Future.