Trump meets Zelenskyy as Russia-Ukraine, US-Iran wars clash

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is expected to be at the White House on Tuesday for talks with US President Donald Trump, as he looks to bolster support for Kyiv at a time when tensions between Russia and Iran have shown signs of convergence.

The meeting comes as the US war against Iran and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine reach a critical stage. Trump has suspended airstrikes against Iran as part of a campaign to give diplomacy another chance, while Zelenskyy has been encouraged by the huge success of the strike on Russian territory.

However, there seems to be no end in sight to any conflict. In fact, the war in the Middle East threatens to overlap with the Russia-Ukraine conflict in recent days.

Kyiv on Saturday launched an attack on an Iranian merchant ship in the Caspian Sea, an incident Tehran said left one sailor dead and several others injured. The Islamic Republic has threatened to retaliate for the strike, with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi saying on social media that “it will NOT go unanswered.”

In a post on X on Saturday, Zelenskyy said that Ukraine “obtained very strong results from long-range strikes in the Caspian Sea – including vessels used for the transportation of military equipment including Iran, as well as a warship.”

Christopher Granville, managing director at TS Lombard, described Ukraine’s attack on an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea as a “very significant” development.

“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also spoke with satisfaction about these strikes and justified them on the grounds that Ukrainian intelligence has evidence that Russian intelligence is helping Iran by targeting US military sites in neighboring countries in the Middle East,” Granville told CNBC’s Early Edition on Monday.

“It is the conflict of these wars. Integration. I think that basically this is very important. From a military point of view how important it is, of course, it is seen, but Iran has said in its public statement that it will go back and that Ukraine has made a mistake that it will regret,” he added.

Ukrainian authorities may be calculating that Iran has its hands full in a war with the US, Granville said, “but as it turns out, military exchanges between [the] The US and Iran died two or three days ago. So, yes, it’s a big deal. ”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha on Monday described Iran’s threats of retaliation as “unfair and baseless.”

The regime of Tehran is “directly in line with Russia’s attack against Ukraine, fueling Moscow’s criminal war with weapons that have killed Ukrainians since 2022,” said Sybiha via X, referring to the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

Russia has long used Iranian-designed Shahed drones in its war against Ukraine, a weapon analysts sometimes call a “poor man’s cruise missile.”

Hamidreza Azizi, an Iranian security expert and visiting fellow at the Berlin-based SWP, said that at the political level, Iran could respond to the attack on Ukraine by recognizing Crimea and Donbas as part of Russian territory, areas taken by Russia that Tehran has so far refused to acknowledge.

“In any case, what is clear is that the war in Iran is increasingly intertwined with two other conflicts: the Saudi-Houthi conflict and the Russia-Ukraine war,” Azizi said on Sunday in a social media post.

“With each passing day, the war is evolving into a complex, multi-faceted and international conflict, he added.

Accompanied by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Zelenskyy is expected to attend the funeral in Washington of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham in the service on Tuesday. Both leaders are scheduled to meet with Trump during their visit.

For Zelenskyy, the meeting represents an opportunity to further improve his relationship with Trump, nearly 17 months since an Oval Office meeting that turned into a rare shouting match.

– CNBC’s Azhar Sukri contributed to this report.