When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy concluded his Middle East tour with 10-year defence cooperation agreements signed with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, the headlines focused on diplomacy.
The more consequential story is what those agreements reveal about how Gulf states are rethinking their security infrastructure - and why they are turning to a country still at war to do it.
The deals are not identical in scope. Riyadh's agreement lays the foundation for future contracts, technological cooperation, and investment. Doha's includes joint defence industry projects, co-production facilities, and technological partnerships.
Abu Dhabi's defence agreement details remain to be finalised. Zelenskyy has also confirmed discussions with Kuwait and Jordan, and fielded requests from Bahrain and Oman. Ukraine has already dispatched more than 200 counter-drone experts to the region.
The common thread is the drone problem, and the brutal economics it has imposed on Gulf defences.
Since the conflict began, Iran has launched more than 850 missiles and 2,650 drones toward Gulf targets, striking oil installations and critical infrastructure. Gulf and US forces have responded with more than 800 Patriot interceptor missiles, weapons costing between one and seven million dollars each, to neutralise Iranian drones worth tens of thousands at most.
The arithmetic is not sustainable. “Iran's use of systems like the Shahed-136 drone has already altered the strategic landscape,” Rasoul Zali, a political analyst at Queen Mary University of London, told The New Arab. “These drones are not just weapons, they are tools of asymmetric pressure: cheap, scalable, and difficult to intercept.” No security doctrine built on that exchange rate survives a long war.
Ukraine has spent years solving precisely this problem, not in doctrine papers but on active battlefields , according to analysts. That experience is what Gulf states are buying. As Zelenskyy said after his tour: “In terms of expertise, no one today can help the way Ukraine can”.
For Zali, this is not incidental.
“Ukraine has been forced, under relentless attack, to solve the drone problem in real time,” he argues. “Not theoretically, not in simulations, but on actual battlefields under constant pressure. This has produced something far more valuable than hardware: adaptable, field-tested defensive doctrine.”
Kuwaiti political analyst Musa’ad Al-Mughnem agrees, describing the deals as “a tool to accelerate the modernisation of the Gulf's warfare model, one that encompasses drones, electronic warfare, and network defence, and draws directly on Ukraine's years of exposure to Iranian systems via the Russian front.”
Some critics have labelled the agreements escalatory, but Zali pushes back firmly.
“That argument confuses military activity with strategic effect,” he told The New Arab . "The region is already militarised. The escalation already happened - when offensive capabilities outpaced defensive ones.”
What the deals do is begin to correct that imbalance, he added. “If drone attacks become harder to execute, less reliable, and more costly, their strategic value declines. And when attacks lose effectiveness, the incentives for launching them decline as well. That is not escalation. That is deterrence finally catching up with reality.”
For Gulf states, Al-Mughnem adds, the cooperation is not about international alignment. “The real driver today is Gulf security itself, in an environment of continuous escalation.”
There is another dimension to the shift that Zali argues is being underplayed. “Despite its extensive presence, the United States has struggled to fully shield regional partners from evolving threats,” he notes.
“Whether due to strategic restraint or cost considerations, the result has been the same: gaps in protection,” he added. Those gaps are driving a movement, from reliance toward redundancy, from dependency toward diversification.
“In this context, Ukraine is not replacing the US,” Zali argues. "It is complementing it, filling a specific and urgent capability gap."
The deals, in his reading, are also not primarily about money. "These agreements are not about profit. They are about neutralising a specific threat, reducing vulnerability, and - in Ukraine's case - pushing back against Iran's military reach beyond Europe.”
But the architecture of these deals is more layered than it first appears.
Ghassan Youssef, a political analyst specialising in Middle East affairs, argues that all of Ukraine's Gulf agreements are concluded with NATO's tacit approval, because Ukraine lacks the independent air defence capacity to supply Gulf states on its own.
“These deals are made in Ukraine's name, but in reality, they are executed by NATO or European countries,” he said, “seeking to put Ukraine in the foreground and send a message to Russia that Kyiv possesses air defence capabilities able to confront attacks”.
The deals, in this reading, carry a dual function: meeting a genuine Gulf need while simultaneously demonstrating Ukraine's strategic utility beyond Europe.
Hussein Imran, a researcher in strategic affairs and regional security at the University of Baghdad, takes that logic further.
“The security cooperation between Ukraine and Gulf states is an indirect channelling of funding to the Ukrainian side,” he said.
“These deals are not merely ordinary military cooperation - they are an indirect mechanism for refinancing the Ukrainian war in a more flexible way. After the prolonged war, the West has begun seeking to reduce its direct financial burden, and the trend is toward distributing the cost among regional allies.”
The Gulf, on this account, is not just a customer. It is becoming part of the financing structure of a war being fought on another continent.
These readings - defensive necessity, deterrence correction, NATO signalling, burden redistribution - are not mutually exclusive. The deals serve all of these purposes simultaneously, which is precisely why they are moving forward.
“The real test is not whether weapons are exchanged, but what changes afterwards,” Zali says. “If this cooperation succeeds, the likely outcome is not a more explosive region, but a more balanced one, where attacks are less effective, defences are more credible, and escalation becomes a less attractive option.”
What the deals do not represent, however, is a fundamental realignment. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Professor of Global Studies at UC Santa Barbara, situates them within a much larger structural shift .
“Much of the Middle East's defences have been organised around US security guarantees,” he said. “This confrontation has exposed, once again, that the United States is not a reliable partner and is not able to provide the protection and security it once promised.”
“The OPEC-era compact - energy stability in exchange for American protection - is fracturing,” he noted.
On the Ukraine deals specifically, Pieterse is measured: they do not fundamentally shift the balance in the short term. The more important signal is the impulse behind them.
“Autonomy from US supply chains and security frameworks is now essential for Gulf states,” he said, and those states are now looking toward China, Asia, Europe, and Ukraine to build the redundancy that a single patron can no longer provide.
The Ukraine deals are one node in that emerging architecture, not its foundation. But they are filling a specific, urgent, and previously unaddressed gap.
“That does not guarantee peace,” Zali concludes. “But it does something just as important: it makes unchecked aggression harder to sustain. And in today's Middle East, that alone is a meaningful shift.” Shaimaa Al Youssef is a journalist specialising in Middle East affairs This article is published in collaboration with Egab Edited by Charlie Hoyle