With a Single Tweet, Ukraine Enters Middle East Fray

Did Ukraine have a hand in the fiery and mysterious drone strikes on an Iranian weapons factory over the weekend? On Saturday night three drones targeted a military factory at Isfahan that is said to be a place of manufacture of advanced weaponry. Multiple news outlets including the Wall Street Journal reported that Israel was responsible for the attack. Israel has been engaged in a shadow war with its arch-enemy Iran since a deeply flawed international nuclear deal meant to check Tehran’s nuclear ambitions collapsed.On Sunday, though, a top adviser to President Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, said in a loaded tweet, “Explosive night in Iran — drone and missile production, oil refineries. Ukraine did warn you.”In that same tweet, the adviser wrote that “war logic is inexorable and murderous. It bills the authors and accomplices strictly.” Tehran got the message: On Monday, a representative of the Islamic Republic’s foreign ministry, Nasser Kanaani, summoned the Ukrainian charge d’affaires in Iran, Yevhen Kravchenko, for an explanation of Mr. Podolyak’s comments. In a statement, Mr. Kanaani condemned “the hostile and provocative position of the advisor to the President of Ukraine” and called his statements “regarding the recent destructive action against the military complex in Isfahan suspicious.”Iran has been supplying self-exploding “kamikaze” drones to Russia for months as Moscow pursues its nearly year-long invasion of Ukraine. Earlier this month the Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on several members of Iran’s Qods Aviation Industries, also known as Light Airplanes Design and Manufacturing Industries, which has been identified as a producer of weaponized drones. On December 30, Russia launched a wave of attacks against targets in Ukraine with 16 Iranian-made drones, the latest of many such strikes. While a good number of the drones are shot down by Ukrainian air defenses, they are each potentially deadly.There was no immediate word from President Zelensky’s office or other Ukrainian officials either about the Iranian reaction to Mr. Podolyak’s tweet or to the Iranians’ reaction to it. Even if nothing else comes of it right now, though, it underscores how the fighting that is going on in Ukraine does not and will not necessarily stay in Ukraine. This is even true if Ukraine did no more than provide moral support for the alleged Israeli strike. Even though Ukraine has every reason to take issue with Iran’s growing involvement in the Russian invasion, it is doubtful that Kyiv would possess the technical means to orchestrate such a complex operation from afar. Yet as the head of Mr. Zelensky’s communications strategy, Mr. Podolyak is a master of social media and there is nothing he conveys via Twitter or other social platforms that is not without a purpose. His periodic comparisons of Russia’s belligerent actions inside Ukraine to “genocide” is clearly meant to rattle cages as well as to lay the groundwork for eventual criminal prosection of alleged Russian war crimes. Yet legal definitions notwithstanding, genocide is a loaded word, particularly in Europe, and use or misuse of the term has been perceived in some quarters as problematic.In any case, if the latest laconic tweet from Mr. Podolyak’s inexhaustible communications quiver was meant to put Tehran on notice, it worked.

With a Single Tweet, Ukraine Enters Middle East Fray

With a Single Tweet, Ukraine Enters Middle East Fray

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