This week we talk about cheap drones, energy resources, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
We also discuss the Strait of Hormuz, the war in Iran, and economic asymmetry.
Recommended Book: The Age of Extraction by Tim Wu
Transcript
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been pretty universally bad for everyone involved, very much including Russia, which going into the fifth year of this conflict, which it started by massing troops on its neighbor’s border and invading, unprovoked, following years of funding asymmetric military incursions in Ukraine’s southeast. Following their full invasion though, Russia has reportedly suffered around 1.25 million casualties, with more than 400,000 of those casualties suffered in 2025, alone. It’s estimated that Russia has also suffered at least 325,000 deaths, and Ukrainian officials reported confirmed kills of more than 30,000 Russian soldiers just in January 2026.
As of early 2026, Russian controlled about 20% of Ukraine, down from the height of its occupation, back in March of 2022, when it controlled 26% of the country.
And due to a combination of military spending, intense and expansive international sanctions, and damage inflicted by Ukraine, it’s estimated that Russia has incurred about $1 trillion in damages, about a fifth of that being direct operational expenses, and around a fourth the result of reduced growth and lost assets stemming from all those sanctions.
There’s a good chance that all of these numbers, aside from the land controlled, are undercounts, too, as some estimates rely on official figures, and those figures are generally assumed to be partially fabricated to allow Russia to keep face in what is already a pretty humiliating situation—a war they started and which they thought would be a walk in the park, lasting maybe a week, but which has instead gone on to reshape their entire country and present one of the biggest threats to Putin’s control over the Kremlin since he took office.
That in mind, a report from last week, at the tail-end of March, suggests that the Kremlin knows things aren’t looking great for them, and they asked Russian oligarchs to donate money to the cause, to help stabilize Russian finances. This report, which is unconfirmed, but has been reported by multiple Russian media entities, arrives at a moment in which the Russian government is also planning cuts to all sorts of spending, including military spending, but also a reported 10% across the board, to all “non-sensitive” matters in its 2026 budget.
Despite these fairly abysmal figures, though, there’s some optimism in Russia-supporting circles right now, in large part because the conflict in Iran, and Iran’s near shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz, which is an important channel for the flow of international energy assets, that’s goosed the price of oil and gas, which in turn has goosed Russian income substantially.
What I’d like to talk about today are the interconnections between the conflict in Ukraine and the conflict in Iran, and how Ukraine being invaded seems to have put them in a position of relative influence and authority in this new conflict in the Middle East.
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From the moment Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian military, and its government, industrial base, and pretty much everyone else, scrambled to find an asymmetric means of keeping a far larger, wealthier, and ostensibly more experienced and better backed foe from just steam-rolling over them.
They found that by leveraging lower-cost deterrents, like cheap rockets and drones, they could pay something like $10,000 to take out a tank or other weapons platform that cost Russia a million or ten million dollars. That’s a pretty stellar trade-off, and if you can do that over and over again, eventually you make the cost of the conflict just ridiculously unbalanced, each trade of hardware costing you very little and them a whole lot, which with time can making waging war unsustainable for the side paying orders of magnitudes more.
Russia is of course making use of inexpensive drones and rockets, as well. That’s become a norm in modern conflicts, especially over the past five years or so, as cheap but capable and easy to produce models have started rolling of manufacturing lines in Iran and Turkey, allowing them to become popular sources of single-use but quite agile and deadly aerial weaponry.
Ukraine has gone further than most other entities, though, as they’re immensely incentivized to get this right, and to put their full support behind anything that gives them the upper-hand against what’s still a powerful and otherwise overwhelming invading force. And this patchwork of companies, independent and government supported, large-ish and tiny enough to operate under constant fire and in wartime conditions, has since scaled-up so that they’re expected to manufacture about 7 million drones of many different varieties in 2026.
This scaling has attracted a lot of outside investment, and Ukraine is now considered to be not just a bulwark against current Russian aggression in Europe, taking the brunt of the damage so that Russia isn’t able to turn its attention to the Baltic states and other potential, future targets. It’s also considered to be a vital resource for future protection against Russia, as the US has become a less reliable ally, and NATO, which until recently has been mostly funded and armed by the US, is still getting its legs under it, more members contributing both money and other resources, but possibly not fast enough.
If Russia were to either win in Ukraine and then turn its full-tilt military machine further west, toward other parts of Europe, or if it were to come to some kind of stalemate or peace agreement in Ukraine and then do the same, many leaders throughout Europe believe that Ukrainians, grizzled and scar from this current invasion, will be the ones to train up comparably inexperienced NATO and European Union forces, and to provide the best new, asymmetry-focused military hardware, like drones of all shapes and sizes, as well.
They’ll be not just the arsenal of NATO and the EU, they’ll also probably be the training officers and commanders.
We already see evidence of this probable future demand for Ukrainian goods and services in Gulf states that were attacked by Iran shortly after Israel and the US launched their own attacks that killed Iran’s leader and caused a great deal of damage throughout the country.
Five Iranian neighbors have reportedly made deals with Ukraine to help them defend against future attacks from Iran, especially drone and missile attacks against their energy and water infrastructure.
This help comes in the form of Ukrainian technology, which has been forged by their war, defending against Russia’s incursion, but also training by Ukrainian experts, who are a lot more informed by those war-time realities, and know how to keep infrastructure safe while at the same time taking out the enemy’s capacity to attack in the future.
Ukraine’s hardware is also super cheap compared to comparable alternatives. Ukraine can produce a long-range strike drone for about $200,000, compared to similar drones made by companies in other western countries that cost between $5-10 million. Ukrainian companies also produce far cheaper anti-personnel drones, and interceptor drones and rockets that can flip the cost considerations in some types of conflict.
Often the attacker will launch a bunch of multi-million dollar rockets, alongside a bunch of $10,000 decoys. If your anti-rocket interceptors hit the decoys, and your interceptors cost more than those decoys, maybe a few million dollars apiece, you very quickly end up spending more than your attacker. Reducing the cost of those defensive materials, then, can give the defender the cost advantage, which makes holding out over the long-haul, but also producing enough interceptors to prevent infrastructure damage and save lives, more financially feasible.
There’s a strange interconnectedness between these two conflicts, then, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has turned Ukraine into a military product and services powerhouse that’s only just now beginning to scale up, but already in high-demand, while at the same time, Iran’s actions in the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off energy product flow through this vital channel, is boosting Russia’s income dramatically at a moment in which it desperately needs that income to keep invading Ukraine.
That influx of resources could help Russia maintain its invasion for longer than they could otherwise manage, and it could give them a leg up, an even bigger advantage than they already have, which in turn could force Ukraine to become even more skillful and experienced, even better at what they do, leading to even better weapons and tactics that they then share with clients and allies in the Middle East for use against Iran.
Show Notes
https://www.cfr.org/articles/securing-ukraines-future-in-europe-ukraines-defense-industrial-base-an-anchor-for-economic-renewal-and-european-security
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-ukraine-drone-defense-ecosystem-205253252.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/world/europe/ukraine-middle-east-oil-and-gas-drones.html
https://gssr.georgetown.edu/the-forum/regions/eurasia/a-first-point-view-examining-ukraines-drone-industry/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/vikrammittal/2026/02/01/ukraine-is-winning-the-economics-battle-against-russian-geran-drones/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/world/europe/ukraine-drones-china.html
https://spectrum.ieee.org/drone-warfare-ukraine
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraines-interceptor-drone-makers-look-exports-gulf-iran-war-flares-2026-03-07/
https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/what-is-ukraines-interceptor-one-of-the-worlds-most-in-demand-drones-17055
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/4-years-of-war-counting-russia-s-costs/3838920
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/23/the-ukraine-war-in-numbers-people-territory-money
https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-grinding-war-ukraine
https://news.sky.com/story/putin-asks-oligarchs-to-donate-to-budget-as-cost-of-ukraine-war-soars-13524940
https://www.reuters.com/world/putin-asks-oligarchs-donate-russias-budget-cost-ukraine-war-soars-bell-media-2026-03-27/
https://apnews.com/article/turkish-oil-tanker-attacked-black-sea-2998c366a90ed280e9781a8b030a050c
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-offensive-drones-c9976319f077c743317edec8a20f57f3
https://apnews.com/article/war-russia-ukraine-drones-innovation-interceptor-shahed-e9de7db6437d3cbb428a6bacac326fb3
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-us-talks-iran-drones-40ad8f5481d954fe8207c3d576d540f7
https://www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/news/russia-blackmail-us-zelensky-ukraine-trump-b2945767.html
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-nato-rebuke-iran-war-11738554
https://www.euronews.com/2026/03/26/pentagon-mulls-redirecting-ukraine-military-aid-to-middle-east-reports-claim
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/ukraine-using-strikes-pressure-russia-after-oil-sanctions-eased-zelenskiy-says-2026-03-26/
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/3/27/ukraine-fends-off-increased-attacks-strikes-russian-oil-revenue
