The war between Russia and Ukraine and the conflict that has pitted the U.S. and Israel against Iran are distinct political clashes driven by unique regional dynamics, but the lines separating them have become blurred, former senior military officials said Wednesday.
Iran has supplied Russia with drones that it has used to batter Ukrainian cities. At the same time, Moscow has provided Tehran with satellite imagery and targeting intelligence, including the location of U.S. warships and military bases.
In July, the convergence became clear when Ukrainian long-range drones struck cargo ships in the Caspian Sea that were shuttling ordnance with Russia.
“It so happens that some of those shipments were Iranian, and Ukraine is not shy about hitting them, no matter who sends it,” said retired Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, a former NATO supreme commander. “Iran has taken umbrage, and now we see that this is going to grow into a wider part of both the Ukrainian and the U.S-Iran conflict.”
On Wednesday, Gen. Breedlove and retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas Bergeson, former deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, addressed the growing links between the Middle East and Ukraine wars in a discussion hosted by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) think tank.
Days after the July 25 drone attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke while both men were in Washington for separate talks with President Trump.
Gen. Bergeson said Russian and Iranian interests have aligned in the Middle East for several years.
“When I was at Central Command, we saw a lot of cooperation between those two nations specifically in Syria in support of the Assad regime,” he said. “The Russians had an interest in maintaining both an air base and a port on the Mediterranean. Iran had an interest in maintaining an open corridor through Syria to supply Lebanese Hezbollah.”
Russia and Iran signed a comprehensive strategic security agreement in January 2025. It wasn’t a mutual defense pact, but it did expand the scale of the technology sharing that was happening between Moscow and Tehran, Gen. Bergeson said.
“What we’re seeing today is clearly the Iranians and the Russians are supplying each other with various technologies that are being used on the battlefield against Ukraine,” he said.
Iran initially supplied Russia with several hundred one-way kamikaze attack drones, primarily the Shahed-136 and the Shahed-131 models. While exact import numbers vary, analysts estimate that Tehran provided from 600 to more than 3,000 units.
Gen. Bergeson said Iran was able to use Russian-supplied intelligence to plan and coordinate recent attacks on the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia and Muwaffaq Air Base in Jordan, which is frequently targeted by Iranian missiles and drone strikes.
“The attack on the air base in Jordan, which actually went after our air defense artillery sites, requires a lot of knowledge of those systems, capabilities, and how to avoid them and then hit them with a lot of accuracy,” he said.
While there is no formal defense agreement between Ukraine and Israel regarding each other’s common enemy, Gen. Bergeson said he could guarantee that discussions are going on at a lower level.
“We absolutely should encourage this kind of sharing of intelligence, tactics, technologies, procedures among like-minded nations that are both in existential fights against enemies that are similar,” he said. “So why not encourage that kind of sharing?”
Gen. Breedlove said the U.S. has had mixed success eliminating Iran’s store of missiles.
“We have been striking hard and precisely, and with good effect on that target set, but they still have the capability to reach out and strike,” he said. “In Iran right now, their mantra is: ’We don’t have to win this war, we just have to survive to perpetuate the war.’”
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