Iran supplied Russia with thousands of Shahed-136 drones to terrorize Ukrainian cities. Russia improved them by upgrading their counter-jamming, warheads, and endurance, and shared the technology back with Tehran. Now, those same enhanced drones are being launched across the Middle East against U.S. and Gulf targets. And who is the world turning to for help? Ukraine, the very country these drones were built to destroy.

The West’s initial response to Iran’s drone barrages exposed a brutal math problem. Patriot interceptor missiles cost roughly $4 million each. The Iranian drones they’re shooting down cost between $20,000 and $50,000. Since the conflict began on February 28, the U.S. and its Middle Eastern partners have burned through over 800 Patriot PAC-3 missiles, more than the 600 delivered to Ukraine across four entire years of war with Russia. At that rate, the stockpiles don’t last and the economics simply don’t work.

So the West pivoted. Ukraine has dispatched military specialists and drone advisers to Jordan, the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia to help build the kind of cheap, layered drone defense that Kyiv spent years perfecting out of sheer necessity. The U.S. Army rushed 10,000 Ukrainian-developed interceptor drones to the region within days. These drones cost as little as $1,000 to $5,000 each, a fraction of a single Patriot missile and Ukraine claims a 90% interception rate against Shaheds using them.

For President Zelensky, this is his strongest card yet. The deal he’s proposing is simple: Ukraine will send its interceptor drones and hard-won expertise to the Middle East, but in return, it wants the Patriot batteries and PAC-3 missiles that Gulf states have in abundance and Ukraine desperately needs. As Zelensky put it, it’s an equal exchange. The country that was left begging for air defenses now holds the one thing nobody else can offer.