Iran’s envoy to the United Nations has accused Ukraine of taking an active role in the war against Tehran. In a letter addressed to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and the Security Council, Iran said Kyiv’s deployment of counter-drone specialists to Middle Eastern countries amounted to “material and operational support” for US and Israeli attacks on Iran.
Amir Saeid Iravani said Ukraine’s actions showed “active participation” in the use of force against Iran, arguing that Kyiv therefore bore responsibility under international law.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Heorhiy Tykhy dismissed Iran’s claims as lies and said Tehran had no standing to accuse Kyiv after supplying Russia with drones used in attacks on Ukraine.
“How to know whether an Iranian regime representative is lying? If his lips move, he is,” Tykhy wrote on X, adding that nearly 60,000 drones supplied by Iran to Russia had struck Ukraine since 2022, while “not a single Ukrainian drone has ever hit Iran.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky said on March 13 that more than 10 countries had already requested Kyiv’s help in countering Iranian drones.
“Ukraine is sharing expertise that is not available in the Middle East,” Zelensky told Reuters in an interview last week. “Expertise is not a drone, but a skill, a strategy, a system where a drone is one part of the defense.”
Iran had already escalated its rhetoric earlier this month. On March 14, Ebrahim Azizi, chairman of the Iranian parliament’s National Security Committee, said Ukrainian territory was “a legitimate target for Iran” in a social media post.
Azizi threatened Ukraine over its air defense support for Middle Eastern countries repelling Iranian drone attacks. By providing such support, he wrote, Ukraine had “effectively turned its entire territory into a legitimate target for Iran” under Article 51 of the UN Charter.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry dismissed the threats and accusations as absurd.
“The Iranian regime has been supporting the murder of Ukrainians for years, by directly sharing drones and technology for Russian aggression against Ukraine,” Tykhy said.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, ties between Moscow and Tehran have deepened. The two countries signed a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty on Jan. 17, 2025, during a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in Moscow.