The European Union’s envoy to the Gulf said Tuesday that the same drone models are hitting Ukraine and Saudi Arabia, after an overnight attack sank a cargo ship off NATO member Bulgaria and Houthi strikes kept Riyadh’s main airport closed.
“These two wars are interlinked,” Luigi Di Maio, the EU’s special representative for the Gulf, told the Warsaw Security Forum, one of Europe’s biggest annual defense and security conferences. “The models of drones hitting the civilian infrastructures in Ukraine are the same models hitting the civilian infrastructures in the GCC,” he said, referring to the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council.
Outside the forum venue, a Ukrainian anti-corruption group displayed one of those drones, a downed Russian Shahed of Iranian design. Beside it lay American, European and Asian microchips that Ukrainians pulled from Russian drones.
People were interested in these podcasts
In Kyiv on Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine received no early warning from its partners about five Russian ballistic missiles that hit civilian infrastructure in the capital city.
Mr. Zelenskyy did not offer more details, but his relations with President Trump have soured in recent days.
Mr. Trump told reporters in Washington that the U.S. has not stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine. “We are helping them, and we are sharing intel,” he said.
Drones hit two merchant ships overnight off Bulgaria. One, the HS Dignity, sank, and 11 of its crew are missing. It was the second such attack off Bulgaria in a week.
Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev said there was no clear evidence of who was responsible but that the outcome benefits Russia, and he summoned Moscow’s ambassador. The ambassador, Eleonora Mitrofanova, said she had no information about attacks on commercial ships and did not rule out a provocation by a third party, the Bulgarian government said. Mr. Radev’s office said some shippers now refuse cargo bound for Bulgarian ports as insurance costs rise.
In Saudi Arabia, King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, which normally handles about 700 flights a day, will stay closed until at least this weekend. A Houthi strike Saturday killed at least 14 people and injured more than 300, Saudi authorities said. The Saudi-led coalition said it intercepted three more drones north of the capital Tuesday.
A coalition of forces in Yemen led by Saudi Arabia carried out new airstrikes Tuesday on the Houthi rebel-held Yemeni capital of Sanaa, The Associated Press reported.
“The contest is shifting from military strength to economic endurance,” Hesham Alghannam, a Carnegie scholar based in Riyadh, told The Washington Times.
He noted that the airport shut down while an energy congress in the capital went ahead about six miles away, “which captures both the pressure and the resilience.”
“But there is a real danger when more exposed Gulf states reach an economic breaking point before the adversary runs out of leverage,” he said.
“Aside from Ukraine, it is the Gulf that has been the front line in deterring, countering and intercepting Iranian air, missile and drone threats,” said Mahdi Ghuloom, a Bahraini geopolitics fellow at Observer Research Foundation Middle East, in Dubai.
More than 200 Ukrainian specialists now work in the region, Mr. Alghannam said. Washington “provides superior firepower,” he said, and Ukraine brings “the economics and experience of surviving sustained drone warfare” against “the identical Shahed platform.”
That combination, he said, “lets Riyadh preserve expensive American missiles for the threats that genuinely require them.”
Danny Citrinowicz, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv and former head of the Iran branch of Israeli military intelligence, said Russia now sends Iran “everything from food and grain to spare parts for the drone and missile capacity.” Russia is “improving their ability to attack U.S. interests in the region,” he said.
The Houthis have warned Washington to stay out. Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a member of the group’s political bureau, said Monday that any U.S. role in the Saudi strikes would bring “a swift and painful response targeting the U.S. and all its interests in the region.”
On Tuesday, the Saudi-led coalition told civilians to leave an oil station in Houthi-held Sanaa ahead of a strike. Houthi spokesman Yahya Saree answered by telling people to clear out of Aramco’s headquarters, a Riyadh refinery and King Khalid airport, which he called “a legitimate target.”
The airport closure kept Saudi Arabia’s vice foreign minister, Waleed Elkhereiji, from reaching Warsaw. The forum had listed him as a speaker.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.