When Iran began firing hundreds of missiles and drones at US partners across the Middle East in late February, Washington and its Gulf allies turned to an unlikely source for help: Ukraine. Hundreds of Ukrainian advisors are now embedded with coalition forces, teaching them how to bring down barrages of expendable Iranian attack drones that American-made air defenses were not designed to stop cheaply.
The shift is striking, Elina Ribakova and Lucas Risinger write in Foreign Affairs, as "Hvylya" reports. Just three years ago, Ukrainian leaders were pleading with NATO to help protect their skies. Now it is Ukraine's military assistance that is in demand - not because Kyiv has the most advanced hardware, but because four years of the most intense drone warfare in history have made it the world's foremost practitioner of drone interception, layered air defense, and electronic warfare.
The economics behind the shift are hard to ignore. Iran produces its offensive drones faster and more cheaply than the United States and its allies produce defensive interceptors. A Patriot missile costs $3.7 million per shot. A Shahed drone costs $35,000. Ukraine learned to crack that equation years ago - with interceptor drones costing a fraction of the targets they destroy.
Ribakova, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute and director at the Kyiv School of Economics, and Risinger, an economic analyst at the KSE Institute, argue that the Gulf deployment is not an anomaly. It reflects a structural advantage Ukraine has built through necessity: the ability to deploy effective, cheap countermeasures at scale. That expertise, they write, is precisely what Europe will need as the continent takes on more responsibility for its own defense.
Also read: How the Iran war exposed critical gaps in U.S. ally air defense capabilities.