Aces High: Zelenskyy Plays His Hand

It turns out that Ukraine has many more cards to play in its fight for national survival than many had thought. President Zelenskyy is playing them with some skill.

By Colby Badhwar

March 13, 2026

A year after the debacle in the Oval Office, the US and its Middle East allies have been getting a small taste of the unrelenting Iranian drone attacks familiar to all Ukrainians. In February, the worst month of the four-year war, it faced an average of 191 missile and drone attacks daily.

Suddenly, since the US-Israeli war against Iran began on February 28, Ukraine’s expertise in dealing with the threat is in high demand as Middle Eastern states received an unwelcome lesson in modern warfare. The Pentagon readily concedes the US has lessons to learn from Kyiv, and it’s also clear that the implementation of these lessons is a work in progress.

Both the Ukrainians and Americans have demonstrated competence in ballistic missile defense, but when it comes to countering unmanned aerial systems, the US lags. The threat has not been ignored, but it is clear that Washington embarked on Operation Epic Fury without an accurate assessment of its likely extent.

Ukraine regularly succeeds in intercepting 90% of the drones that Russia throws its way. Its ability to intercept Russian ballistic missiles has been more variable and depends entirely on limited supplies of interceptors made in the US and France.

Iran’s attacks on its neighbors mirror those of Russia on Ukraine, with hundreds of drones and dozens of ballistic missiles. There has been good success for US allies in the Middle East defending against Iran’s ballistic missiles, thanks to Patriot and THAAD systems, which are in much more ample supply there than in Ukraine.

However, nearly 100 Iranian drones have managed to penetrate the United Arab Emirates’ air defenses, and this is where Zelenskyy’s cards come into play. He has announced that Ukrainian personnel are being sent to the Middle East to help protect civilian infrastructure and US forces.

While this is done as a gesture of goodwill, Zelenskyy hopes it can also benefit Kyiv, with some sort of drone/missile swap arrangement improving its ballistic missile defense interceptor stocks.

It’s not the first time the Ukrainian president has offered such a deal. Since the Trump administration returned to office, he has pivoted from appeals for security assistance to mutual defense cooperation. In August, during a friendlier meeting at the White House, Zelenskyy pitched Trump on partnering to produce interceptor drones.

The Ukrainian team even prepared a PowerPoint presentation, highlighting the threat Iranian drones posed to US forces and their allies in the Middle East and saying Kyiv could help build a regional drone defense network. The proposal was ignored by the administration; one US official told Axios that “if there’s a tactical error or a mistake we made leading up to this [war in Iran], this was it.”

Better late than never. Ukrainian counter-drone teams will now be working with US forces in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. While predictions of American and allied Patriot batteries running out of interceptors in the Middle East have not come true, the Ukrainians will have an opportunity to demonstrate their know-how against Iran’s remaining drones.

It is mostly a question of tactics, techniques, and procedures. Ukraine cannot supply the US or the Gulf states with large numbers of interceptor drones at short notice — that opportunity was passed up in August — but it can share its valuable experience.

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Even a simple .50 caliber heavy machine gun mounted on a pickup truck can be effective when deployed intelligently. Likewise, Ukraine’s simple but effective acoustic network listens out for the whine of drone engines and feeds the information to a central point. Such low-tech solutions might seem out of place next to the region’s sophisticated anti-ballistic missile systems, but they are every bit as important. When a drone slips through the cracks, having a final layer of defense around high-value assets is essential.

The Ukrainians want anti-ballistic missile capabilities, and there is more hope than first thought that a bargain could be struck. Aside from Bahrain, interceptor stocks have held up well, and less than 1% of the ballistic missiles fired at the UAE have successfully struck its territory, with the rest either falling short or being intercepted.

Alongside underestimating the drone threat, US forces may also be expending fewer ballistic missile interceptors than they expected. It is telling that, despite media claims from anonymous US officials that they are running out of munitions, there are no specific details about interceptors.

With every passing day, more missile launchers in Iran are destroyed, further reducing the potential strain on missile defense batteries. Excluding the Israelis, who produce their own interceptors, it is conceivable that US and allied forces may have expended around 1,200 interceptors thus far.

Although this is a substantial figure, it represents less than one year of interceptor production in the US. In 2026, Raytheon is likely to produce between 360 and 420 PAC-2 GEM-T missiles and 72 SM-3s, while Lockheed Martin is expected to make between 650 and 700 PAC-3 MSEs and 98 Talons (THAAD).

The prevailing discourse suggests the US has dug itself into a hole from which it has no hope of ever escaping, but the available evidence does not support this supposition. For Ukraine, this means interceptors stand to become more plentiful in the medium- to long-term.

Regardless of the outcome of the war in the Gulf, Iran’s ballistic missile program is being dealt a devastating blow, and this will result in a substantial reduction in demand for the missile defense assets and stockpiles in US Central Command’s area of responsibility.

There is no reason to believe the Trump administration will become more charitable towards Ukraine as a result, but Zelenskyy has done what he can to demonstrate the value of partnering with his country. If nothing else, the US will be in a better position to sell Patriot interceptors to Ukraine via the European-funded Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) program.

Operation Epic Fury has underlined that interceptors are a tool to buy time, not an end in themselves. If it weren’t for US and Israeli aircraft destroying Iran’s missile and drone capabilities, allied air defenses would have been quickly exhausted. What Zelenskyy needs are more offensive weapons to tackle Russia’s missiles at source.

Ukraine will never have an air force like the US or Israel, but it can be provided with additional long-range missiles to hit Russia’s capabilities. The Trump administration determined that Iran was not negotiating in good faith and decided on a kinetic option, and it’s long past time to realize Vladimir Putin is running the same playbook.

Force is the only language Putin understands, and they should equip Ukraine accordingly.

Colby Badhwar is a security columnist for The Insider, a Russia-focused, independent media outlet. He writes on global security issues, with an emphasis on armaments and the arms trade. He is a founding member of Tochnyi, a collaborative project covering the War in Ukraine with a weekly podcast, where his research and analysis can be heard. He resides in Toronto, Canada.

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.