On July 25, a cargo ship anchored in the Caspian Sea, not too far from the mouth of the Volga River, became the target of Ukrainian drones. The attack left one crew member dead and caused considerable damage to the vessel.
The Security Service of Ukraine, the country’s intelligence agency, announcedshortly after that they had targeted a sanctioned vessel that was being “used to transport military cargo to Russia.”
For months now, the Ukrainian military had shifted its offensive and had been targeting Russian interests on land and at sea, in an attempt to inflict damage, and with relative success, to the infrastructure enabling Russia’s invasion of its territory. In that sense, this attack was not out of the ordinary.
But this ship, named MV Anna, was not Russian, but Iranian.
The Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi asserted that the targeted vessel was a commercial ship, demanding restitution and threatening a military response. He also accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of dragging Europe into the continuing war in the Middle East. In political corridors in the West, many stakeholders and observers feared that the attack could trigger the convergence of the two of the world’s largest wars: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the U.S.’s attacks on Iran.
Despite the risk of escalation, diplomatic machinery kicked in, and the dispute was resolved by the following Tuesday. Iran was reportedly assured that the attack was unintentional. An Iranian military advisor said that Tehran’s plans to launch strikes at three Ukrainian sites were cancelled after an “apology” from Kyiv.
But the fact is that Ukraine and Iran are already engaged in a conflict, even if they haven’t directly faced each other on the battlefield. After all, Iran and Ukraine have both maintained support for each other’s enemies for years.
Iran has consistently backed the Russian military since before it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022. Just months before President Vladimir Putin launched his “special operation” in Ukraine, in 2021, Iran sold $4-billion worth of weapons to Russia, most notably the Shahed unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), fleets of suicide drones that Russia still uses on a near-daily basis and that wreak havoc in Ukrainian cities. And in 2023, for US$1.75-billion, Iran allowed Russia to produce its own drones based on the Iranian models called the Geran UAV. Russia now mass-produces more than 400 of these drones and similar variants a day at the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Russia.
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