Ukraine’s attack on an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea on July 25 has changed the strategic landscape in the world, triggering widespread discussion of a new phase of war, even in the mainstream press.
The event caused major blowback from within Iran, with many officials vowing retaliation for an attack against a civilian vessel. Many commentators and analysts explicitly raised the prospect of NATO’s implicit involvement, describing Ukraine as the “European Union’s proxy” and that the strike had dragged the EU into the war. An anonymous senior Iranian source told Amwaj.media that the incident was designed to open a new front in the conflict, “dragging Iran into war” amid efforts to reach an agreement.
Ukrainian officials have not helped much. Ukraine’s Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs Andriy Sybiha wrote on X in response to a statement by Iran’s Foreign Minister: “The regime in Teheran is a direct accomplice to Russian aggression against Ukraine,” and it “has no standing to pretend to be a victim, let alone justify its threats with absurd references to the UN Charter.” Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel Yevhen Korniychuk stated in an interview with Israel’s N12: “This isn’t the first time we’ve struck such military targets, and, of course, you can expect us to strike them again—from our perspective, this is an entirely legitimate military target. We are fighting the same enemy, the other side of the same axis of evil.” Zelensky himself said in a July 26 interview with Sky News that “We have to be honest. Iranians… already attacked us” by supplying drones to Russia.
One analyst wrote that the Iran was is “becoming increasingly intertwined with two other conflicts: the Saudi-Houthi confrontation and the Russia-Ukraine war. With each passing day, the war is evolving into an increasingly complex, multidimensional, and international conflict.” Trita Parsi, co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said about the event: “Ukraine is not trying to just enter the war with Iran. Rather, it appears it is trying to merge the Ukraine war with the Iran war. Why? Because if these two wars merge, Ukraine will be a belligerent in the Iran war and America will be a belligerent in the Ukraine war.” This view was shared by former U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia, William Courtney, who told Al Jazeera that Kiev’s stunt was an attack on Washington’s “enemy number one,” intended to please the U.S.
Ukraine has sent drone experts to Gulf states to help in war with Iran over recent months, but this is a qualitative escalation.
The Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman wrote in a July 27 editorial that these two wars, previously largely distinct, “are beginning to overlap.” While there are still layers of diplomacy and functional relations between the global superpowers supporting the main actors in each conflict, namely the U.S. and Russia, with China also playing a role, Rachman writes, “it does not guarantee that another world war is impossible. As the history of the 20th century demonstrated, regional conflicts and great-power miscalculation can be a deadly combination.”
Iran’s and Ukraine’s foreign ministers spoke by phone on July 28 in what appears to have been a de-escalation in the rising tensions, though the danger of an expansion of the conflict very much remains.
