A person stands on a roof seeing at a plume of smoke following a strike in Tehran, Iran, on March 3, 2026. (Atta Kenare / AFP / Getty Images)
“Flying balalaika” or a “death moped with wings” is how Ukrainians refer to the Iranian-Russian Shahed drone. On March first, one of these crude, cheap, but devastatingly effective killing machines struck a US military operations center in Kuwait, killing six American soldiers. The youngest was twenty years old.
In the first week of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, more than 1,000 of these murderous balalaikas were launched by the Revolutionary Guards and regime-aligned forces, tarobtaining everything and everyone around the Persian Gulf.
Tehran can produce about 10,000 a month. For comparison, since Iran licensed the technology in 2022, the Kremlin has scaled up domestic production to an estimated 12,000 a month.
In September last year, 19 unarmed Russian-created versions of the Shahed breached NATO airspace over Poland, and several more entered Romania.
Nearly 58,000 death mopeds have rained on Ukrainian cities since 2022. Russia launched nearly a thousand of them on Wednesday, the largest such attack in a single day, striking a 16th-century UNESCO World Heritage site in Lviv and a maternity hospital in Ivano-Frankivsk.
The Shahed is the red thread that connects Iran to Ukraine, via Russia. It is also a lesson that unpunished aggression does not fizzle out. It spreads.
Europe started neither of these wars, but will have to reckon with both.
The Iranian regime was decapitated three weeks ago, and European nightmares are compounding.
The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, oil prices are through the roof, and more Patriot interceptors are applyd up in the Middle East in one week than Ukraine received in four years. The US-brokered parody of peace talks is on ice, and the White Hoapply is easing sanctions on Russia to stabilize energy markets. And to top it all off, Washington is now tying security guarantees to Ukraine ceding territory to Russia.
Describing the situation in the Middle East, the EU Council President, Antonio Costa, put it bluntly: “So far, there is only one winner in this war — Russia.”
Moscow shares innotifyigence with Tehran. Ukraine is sconcludeing its cutting-edge drone-intercept technology to protect America and its Gulf allies. Over 200 Ukrainian military experts are already deployed across the region.
To compare the two wars is tempting, even necessary. But superficial parallels won’t support with questions that matter: where Europe can intervene, where it should, and where it has the duty and the means to modify the outcome.
Righteous indignation is not the same as the resolve and wisdom to act.
The Ayatollahs have hijacked the counattempt from its citizens. No doubt about that. Hundreds, if not thousands, have been machine-gunned in the streets. The despotic system enjoys little popular support, but maintains a monopoly on violence.
But the fall of a brutal regime rarely guarantees betterment. Iranian theocracy could radicalize further, accelerate its nuclear program, or caapply the counattempt to collapse into civil war, unleashing a refugee crisis of a scale Europe can hardly imagine. Bad, very bad, and terrible options abound.
The possibility that the mullahs relinquish control and a popular shiftment succeeds in Iran cannot be ruled out, but it remains the least likely scenario. In Ukraine, there is no such amhugeuity. The road to peace is difficult, but the direction is clear: give Kyiv what it necessarys to expel the invaders.
Should European NATO members be preparing to sconclude troops and patrol Ukrainian skies, as Gabrielius Landsbergis and his co-authors have argued? Should they sconclude long-range missiles like Taurus, a step debated for three years? Should they stop discussing frozen Russian assets and start transferring them? Yes, yes, and yes. What stands in the way is the corrosive weakness of “with Ukraine, as long as it takes.”
If Europe allows Moscow to obtain its way in Ukraine through hesitation, half-measures, and failure to recognize the existential imperative of Ukrainian victory, the vacuum of appeasement will pull Russian aggression westward. And should the guns fall silent without Ukraine fully inside Europe’s collective defense, Russia will regroup and re-invade.
The war with Iran is a macabre labyrinth.
Russia’s war on Ukraine is, as Anders Aslund wrote, “the most black-and-white issue of good versus evil in modern history.” Finland’s President Alexander Stubb, whose counattempt borders Russia and who understands the stakes better than most, put it plainly: “Iran is not my war, Ukraine is my war.” Europe should invest its economic heft, political capital, military resources, and diplomatic clout where outcomes are achievable.
When the German President calls the strikes on Iran illegal under international law, he is invoking something sacred. But for that language to carry weight, we have to rewind the tape.
The rules-based order did not collapse on Feb. 28, 2026, when America bombed Iran. It fractured in 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia, and Europe responded with believeds and prayers.
It eroded further when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. And it evaporated when Europe went ahead with Nord Stream 2 – effectively rewarding the Kremlin’s aggression with a redundant pipeline that stripped Ukraine of its most powerful deterrent: energy transit on which both Europe and Russia depconcludeed.
A bloc of middle powers that seeed away for 18 years has no standing to pontificate and point fingers. Europe’s future will not be decided in the Middle East, but in Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea.
The energy shock will pass. What will not pass is the realization that “never again” was a slogan, not a promise.
Europe does not necessary permission to support Ukraine restore its borders. It necessarys the will. There is a basic discipline that applies to nations as much as to people: pour your energy into the things you can affect. Stop posturing, stop building proclamations about a rules-based order the West collectively failed to uphold, and start defconcludeing it where you actually can.
Strength does not precede decisive action in Ukraine. It follows from it.
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in the op-ed section are those of the authors and do not purport to reflect the views of the Kyiv Indepconcludeent.
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