Top Former U.S. Generals Say Wars in Ukraine, Iran Becoming Steadily Intertwined

The war between Russia and Ukraine and the conflict that has pitted the U.S. and Israel against Iran are distinct political clashes driven by unique regional dynamics, but the lines separating them have become blurred, former senior military officials said Wednesday on a JINSA webinar.

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“It so happens that some of those shipments were Iranian, and Ukraine is not shy about hitting them, no matter who sends it,” said retired Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, a former NATO supreme commander. “Iran has taken umbrage, and now we see that this is going to grow into a wider part of both the Ukrainian and the U.S-Iran conflict.”

On Wednesday, Gen. Breedlove and retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas Bergeson, former deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, addressed the growing links between the Middle East and Ukraine wars in a discussion hosted by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) think tank.

Days after the July 25 drone attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke while both men were in Washington for separate talks with President Trump.

Gen. Bergeson said Russian and Iranian interests have aligned in the Middle East for several years

“When I was at Central Command, we saw a lot of cooperation between those two nations specifically in Syria in support of the Assad regime,” he said. “The Russians had an interest in maintaining both an air base and a port on the Mediterranean. Iran had an interest in maintaining an open corridor through Syria to supply Lebanese Hezbollah.”

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