Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday that he had given orders to provide the United States with drone equipment and Ukrainian experts after Washington formally requested help defending against Iran’s Shahed drones. Zelenskyy said he had also spoken in recent days with the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, and Kuwait about possible cooperation in countering the same Iranian systems.
The offer comes as a war in Iran, in its sixth day on Thursday, has drawn international attention from the Russia-Ukraine conflict and forced the postponement of a new round of U.S.-brokered peace talks planned for this week.
Ukraine has spent more than four years absorbing mass Shahed barrages from Russia and developing cut-price interceptors — experience now drawing interest from governments confronting the same drone threat in the Middle East. Zelenskyy announced earlier this year that Ukraine would begin exporting its battle-tested systems; U.S. and European diplomacy is now moving to channel that capacity toward the emerging regional crisis.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday that he had issued orders to provide the United States with drone equipment and Ukrainian experts after Washington formally requested help defending against Iran’s Shahed drones — the same weapon Russia has fired in the tens of thousands at Ukraine since its full-scale invasion more than four years ago.
Zelenskyy said he had also spoken in recent days with the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, and Kuwait about possible cooperation in countering Shahed systems. European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas chaired a video-link meeting of EU and Gulf foreign ministers on Thursday to discuss drawing on Ukraine’s drone-warfare experience.
President Donald Trump, in a Reuters interview, said the United States welcomed the offer. “Certainly I’ll take, you know, any assistance from any country,” Trump said.
Ukraine’s conditions for sharing
Zelenskyy said Ukraine would provide assistance only if doing so did not weaken its own defenses and if it added diplomatic leverage for Kyiv. Ukraine has announced it would begin exporting its battle-tested systems, developed under battlefield pressure and priced to scale: the country has produced cut-price drone killers costing as little as $1,000 each, as well as interceptors designed specifically to hunt and destroy incoming Shaheds.
Russia has fired tens of thousands of the Iranian-designed drones at Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, including a barrage of more than 800 drones and decoys in what Ukrainian officials described as the largest single nighttime attack of the war.
Iran war delays peace talks
The offers of drone cooperation emerged as a conflict involving Iran — in its sixth day Thursday — drew international diplomatic bandwidth away from the Russia-Ukraine war. A new round of U.S.-brokered trilateral peace talks that had been planned for this week was postponed because of the Middle East situation, according to the Associated Press.
Oleksandr Merezhko, a Ukrainian lawmaker and foreign affairs committee chairman, urged Washington to view the two conflicts as linked. Russia and Iran are close allies, Merezhko said, and he called on the U.S. to treat their actions as coordinated.
Prisoner exchange continues
Despite the postponement of broader peace negotiations, a prisoner swap moved forward Thursday. The United States facilitated the return of 200 Ukrainian prisoners of war from Russian custody, and Russia’s Defense Ministry confirmed it received 200 Russian prisoners in return. Russian chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said a total of 500 prisoners from each side would be exchanged across Thursday and Friday.
On the battlefield, the Institute for the Study of War reported that localized Ukrainian counterattacks had liberated roughly 257 square kilometers — about 100 square miles — since Jan. 1, more territory than Ukrainian forces had lost in the final two weeks of February.