Turan Research Center

Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla.

In a recent farewell interview, Peter Fischer, Germany's outgoing ambassador to Georgia, cautioned against overstating the importance of the Middle Corridor. His remarks answered a narrative the Georgian government has promoted with growing insistence: that the corridor is strategically indispensable to Europe, and that because it runs through Georgia, Brussels has little choice but to soften its stance and engage Tbilisi on more favorable terms. The two sides read the corridor's significance very differently. This article assesses it on its merits.

Background

In March 2022, weeks after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey signed a declaration to deepen cooperation on the route; that November, their foreign and transport ministers followed with a 2022–2027 roadmap for removing bottlenecks. Together, these marked a new phase for the Middle Corridor — an effort to strengthen Europe–Asia connectivity along a path that bypasses Russian territory.

The concept itself is not new. It dates to the early 2000s, when Turkey first promoted it as a way to connect the wider Turkic world of Central Asia while positioning itself as a transit hub between China and Europe. At the time, it drew little interest from either Beijing or Brussels and was often dismissed as an expression of Pan-Turkic ambition.

For years the corridor remained in the shadow of competing routes. Its infrastructure was inadequate, and goods had to cross multiple countries, customs regimes, and tariff zones. The Northern Corridor — mainly a railway route through Russian territory — offered greater efficiency, larger capacity, and fewer border complications, and it remained the preferred option for Europe–Asia trade, especially for China.

The war in Ukraine changed that calculus. As Russia became an unreliable transit partner, both Europe and China began looking for alternatives. Disruptions in the Red Sea and the Suez Canal sharpened that interest, and more recent tensions around the Strait of Hormuz have drawn unprecedented attention to the route and its potential to supplement — or partly replace — established East–West corridors.

A second factor has raised the corridor's strategic profile: Central Asia's emergence as a major source of critical minerals. In an era of artificial intelligence, advanced semiconductors, and digital infrastructure, access to these inputs is becoming essential not only to economic development but to technological and military competitiveness.

The Middle Corridor's importance for Europe

Despite the contrasting assessments offered by Tbilisi and Berlin, the underlying question stands: do Georgians overstate the corridor's significance, particularly for the European Union?

From a purely logistical standpoint, the corridor's potential is modest. Sustained investment since 2022 has lifted annual transit volumes from roughly half a million tons to around five million. The World Bank projects that volumes could roughly triple from their 2022 level to some eleven million tons by 2030. Even so, these figures remain small beside established routes: the Northern Corridor has an annual capacity of about 100 million tons, and the Strait of Hormuz carries some 20 million barrels of oil and petroleum products a day. The Middle Corridor is therefore unlikely to become the principal artery between Europe and China. That ceiling, however, does not determine its influence on Europe's economic and geopolitical trajectory.

Central Asia's energy wealth has long drawn European interest, but geopolitical constraints — and Russia's determination to preserve Europe's dependence on its exports — frustrated efforts to build direct links. Europe nonetheless kept investing in the region, particularly in transport and connectivity. With Russia now pinned down in Ukraine, direct energy cooperation between Central Asia and Europe has moved from aspiration toward possibility.

Beyond energy, Central Asia has recently emerged as a significant source of critical minerals. Rare earth elements and strategic metals — scandium, yttrium, neodymium, and other lanthanides — are essential inputs for electric vehicles, wind turbines, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and modern defense systems. Securing access to them matters increasingly to a European Union intent on strengthening its economic resilience and strategic autonomy.

To deepen connectivity with the region, the European Union has committed substantial resources. At the 2025 EU–Central Asia summit, Brussels announced a €12 billion package for transport infrastructure, digital connectivity, and other strategic projects. European institutions are also working with regional governments to align customs procedures and digital systems with EU standards, easing the movement and tracking of goods. Brussels has advanced plans for a Black Sea submarine cable to strengthen the digital links between the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and Europe. These commitments have been matched by an intensification of high-level diplomacy, visible in the rising number of senior European visits to both regions.

The Middle Corridor in the context of Georgian–European relations

Just as the Middle Corridor seemed poised to become another point of convergence between Georgia and the European Union, relations between Tbilisi and Brussels deteriorated sharply. In 2024, the Georgian government — once a frontrunner for EU membership — suspended its accession process, and criticism of the Union became a fixture of official rhetoric. The European Parliament responded with several resolutions calling for sanctions on Georgian Dream officials.

The scale of Europe's investment and the intensity of its diplomacy leave little doubt that Brussels considers the Middle Corridor strategically important. Yet that interest has not improved its relations with Georgia. Some credible experts and institutions have urged Brussels to recalibrate — to approach Tbilisi pragmatically, as it does Azerbaijan and several Central Asian states, rather than through a primarily value-based lens. The EU has held to its principled position.

Georgia presents Brussels with a particular difficulty. Few countries in the region have absorbed comparable political, economic, and institutional investment from the Union over the past two decades. Georgia's political turn has therefore produced a disappointment that European policymakers find hard to ignore.

A further complication is how Tbilisi positions itself within the corridor. The government increasingly casts Georgia as an indispensable, irreplaceable node between East and West. Asserting geographic advantage is legitimate in principle; here it reads externally as an attempt to convert geography into pressure on traditional partners.

That posture, and the broader deadlock, pushed Western policymakers to weigh alternatives that would diminish Georgia's role. As efforts to normalize Armenian–Azerbaijani relations advanced — particularly around the Zangezur Corridor — attention turned to a wider transit initiative now known as the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). Despite holding a geographical advantage and cutting travel time by 25% compared to the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars Railway, the TRIPP route still cannot replace Georgia's strategic role in the Middle Corridor.

Georgia possesses several structural advantages that reinforce its role as a key hub connecting East and West. Most notably, alongside its overland transport infrastructure, the country benefits from access to the Black Sea, where its ports are integrated with the national railway network. This multimodal connectivity facilitates the efficient and cost-effective movement of goods between Europe and Asia. Georgia’s maritime infrastructure also carries considerable strategic importance in the energy sector, as Black Sea ports and terminals provide critical outlets for energy transportation and diversification initiatives.

Furthermore, both the current cargo-handling limitations of the Middle Corridor and the growing volume of trade between Asia and Europe, there is sufficient demand to accommodate multiple transit routes across the South Caucasus. Rather than competing directly, the existing and proposed corridors are likely to operate in a complementary manner.

Brussels has not formally opposed TRIPP, but its engagement has remained largely invisible in practice. The ownership structure helps explain why: under the framework signed in May 2026, a US entity linked to the Development Finance Corporation would hold a 74 percent stake in the joint venture overseeing the corridor, against Armenia's 26 percent. The project's most prominent advocate has accordingly been the Trump administration, which treats the route as central to connecting Central Asia — a region whose rare earth potential, underscored by Kazakhstan's 2025 Karagandy discovery, has become a declared strategic priority for Washington.

Conclusion

The asymmetry is the point. Europe values the Middle Corridor, but as one instrument among several for securing the energy and minerals its high-tech and defense industries will need, not as a dependency that Tbilisi can price. For Georgia, the stakes run deeper: handled well, the corridor could turn a peripheral state into the indispensable gateway between East and West, anchored by Black Sea ports, overland networks, and digital infrastructure. That prospect is what Tbilisi is spending. By treating geography as leverage rather than as shared interest, the government invites precisely the search for alternatives — TRIPP among them — that would erode the advantage it claims. Brussels, for its part, has left little room for dialogue by holding its principled line without qualification. The friction serves neither side and slows the corridor that both profess to want. The war in Iran has handed Georgia a reprieve by reaffirming its place on the route; the question is whether Tbilisi treats it as a window to rebuild the partnership or as fresh proof that Europe has nowhere else to go.

Bako Kheladze is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Irregular Warfare Initiative, specializing in international relations and security studies, with a particular focus on Iran, the South Caucasus, and Eurasian geopolitics. He holds an M.A. in International Security Studies from the University of Leicester. Previously, he served as a Press Officer at the Embassy of Georgia to the Islamic Republic of Iran. He is fluent in Georgian, English, Persian, and Russian.

Kazakhstan has fewer westbound oil export routes today than at any point since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On May 1, Moscow closed the northern leg of the Druzhba pipeline to Germany, citing "technical" reasons and eliminating a channel that carried more than 2 million tons of Kazakh crude in 2025. That closure landed in the middle of a slower-moving crisis on Astana's primary export artery, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), whose marine terminal near Novorossiysk has been struck repeatedly by Ukrainian drones since early 2025. The most damaging attack, in late November, destroyed one of the terminal's three single-point mooring buoys and reduced offshore loading to a third of capacity for nearly two months. SPM-2 remains offline.

Astana is now caught between the country it depends on for transit and the country fighting that transit's owner. The Ukrainian pressure is by far the costlier of the two, and the bill is falling overwhelmingly on Kazakhstan and the Western majors that operate its upstream—not on Russia, which the strikes were meant to punish. The CPC sits on Russian territory, but in 2024 just 15 percent of its 1.2 million barrels per day of throughput was Russian crude. The remainder came from Kazakhstan's three supergiants: Tengiz, Kashagan, and Karachaganak. Astana shipped roughly 55 million tonsthrough the route last year, accounting for some 80 percent of its total oil exports and around 40 percent of national export revenue.

The Western corporate footprint is equally exposed. Russian state entities (Transneft and the Russian Federation directly) hold 31 percent of CPC equity, and KazMunayGas 20.75 percent. The balance is divided among Chevron (15 percent), Lukoil (12.5 percent), ExxonMobil's Mobil affiliate (7.5 percent), Rosneft-Shell (7.5 percent), BG Overseas (2 percent), Eni (2 percent), and Oryx (1.75 percent). The same Western majors operate the upstream fields the pipeline serves: Chevron holds 50 percent of Tengizchevroil and ExxonMobil 25 percent. Uninterrupted CPC flow is therefore a direct commercial interest for several of the world's largest U.S. and European energy firms.

The pattern of attacks

The November strike was the most damaging in a year-long Ukrainian campaign against CPC infrastructure. In February and March 2025, drones hit the Kropotkinskaya and Kavkazskaya pumping stations, cutting flows by 30 to 40 percent. A September strike damaged the consortium's offices in Novorossiysk. The November 29 attack destroyed SPM-2, with SPM-3 already offline for scheduled maintenance through January. Loading was left dependent on SPM-1 alone. Winter storms in the Black Sea compounded the disruption. On January 13, drones struck two tankers — the Delta Harmony and the Matilda — loading Kazakh cargo, sending insurance premiums on CPC tanker calls sharply higher.

The CPC attacks fit within Ukraine's broader campaign against Russia's hydrocarbon economy. Strikes on at least 17 Russian refineries since early 2025 took roughly 20 percent of refining capacity offline at peak, though actual processing volumes fell only 3 to 6 percent as Moscow drew on idle capacity. Russia's retaliatory campaign has been more destructive: January strikes hit energy installations across 17 Ukrainian regions, disrupting heating in some 6,000 apartment buildings and cutting it entirely from another 1,100.

The bill for Kazakhstan

CPC exports from Kazakhstan fell 19 percent in December compared with November. Oil production contracted by close to 20 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, concentrated at Tengiz — where Tengizchevroil's $46.7 billion Future Growth Project achieved first oil only in January 2025 and was meant to drive Kazakhstan's production growth this decade. The Energy Ministry put January losses alone at $1.5 billion.

Two emergency responses followed. The first was operational: Kazakhstan accelerated delivery of two new single-point mooring units from the United Arab Emirates, contracted for $124.2 million, moving the timeline from April 2026 to January 2026. Delivery has since been complicated by the Iran war, and only one unit had arrived by April. The second was diplomatic. Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry filed a formal protest calling the November strike "the third act of aggression against an exclusively civilian facility whose operation is safeguarded by norms of international law" and warned that further incidents would damage bilateral ties. Ukraine's Foreign Ministry rejected the framing, faulted Kazakhstan for not having protested Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, and offered no commitment to halt strikes on CPC assets. Astana also appealed to Washington and Brussels to help secure Black Sea shipments — a request with material weight, given that EU member states absorb roughly 60 percent of Kazakhstan's oil exports and Western majors hold the equity stakes most exposed to further CPC damage.

The limits of alternative routes

The CPC's dominance reflects its economics: lower transit costs and higher throughput than any route available to landlocked Kazakhstan. According to Nurlan Zhumagulov, executive director of the Energy Monitor Foundation, the combined capacity of all alternative routes tops out at roughly 20 million tons per year, against the CPC's roughly 60 million. The Atyrau–Samara pipeline to Russia and the Atasu-Alashankou line to China both require capital-intensive modernization and additional pumping stations. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan route, accessed across the Caspian, is constrained by falling sea levels that limit tanker operations. Netbacks on all three are lower than via the CPC.

Diversification is occurring at the margins. Kazakh shipments via Atasu-Alashankou have risen by 50,000 tons, and via Atyrau–Samara to 255,500 barrels per day. Most of the volume previously moving through the Druzhba northern leg is being redirected to the CPC — meaning that as Russia closes one Kazakh export channel and Ukraine degrades another, Astana's options are narrowing from both ends simultaneously.

The strategic miscalculation

Ukraine's CPC campaign imposes marginal costs on Russia and serious costs on the partners Kyiv most needs. If the consortium were to stop entirely, Russia would forfeit roughly $600 to $650 million annually in dividends, taxes, and the added expense of railing North Caucasus crude to Novorossiysk. Kazakhstan and the Western majors operating its upstream would lose closer to $27 billion. The same Western firms whose governments arm and finance Ukraine — Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, Eni — are absorbing the damage, alongside the EU customers who take 60 percent of Kazakh exports and grew more dependent on that supply after the Iran war disrupted Persian Gulf flows. Kyiv appears to be calculating that any blow to Russian-territory oil infrastructure is a blow to Moscow. The arithmetic does not support that. What the strikes are accomplishing is steady erosion of Kazakh-Ukrainian relations and quieter strain with Western partners whose economic interests run directly through the pipeline. If the campaign continues, Ukraine will have spent diplomatic capital it cannot afford for an operational gain Moscow can readily absorb.

Aida Amangeldina is a policy analyst focusing on the intersection of geopolitics, energy security, and environmental issues in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, and the Caspian Sea region. She holds a bachelor's degree in Political Science from Eurasian National University named after L.N. Gumilyov and a master's degree in International Relations and Political Science from Nazarbayev University. She has published articles in outlets such as Carnegie Politika, The Diplomat, Beda Media, CABAR.asia, Asya Avrupa, and ENERGY Insight & Analytics.

Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla.

The Saudi and Emirati strikes on Iranian territory during the past two months mark a turning point in the evolution of Gulf security doctrine. For decades, the Arab Gulf states cultivated an image of cautious pragmatism, relying on diplomacy, alliances, and deterrence-by-proxy to manage their fraught relationship with Tehran. They avoided direct confrontation, preferring to outsource hard security to Western powers while hedging through economic diversification and quiet diplomacy. Reuters' reporting on Saudi airstrikes against Iranian military sites in late March and the Wall Street Journal's confirmation that the UAE struck the Lavan Island refinery on April 8 suggest a decisive departure from that tradition. Even without official acknowledgment from either capital, the evidence points to a new willingness to project force across borders — signaling capability, intent, and a recalibration of deterrence.

These operations unfolded against the backdrop of the US–Israeli war on Iran, which erupted on February 28, 2026. Iranian retaliation was swift and indiscriminate; missiles and drones struck all six Gulf Cooperation Council states, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and disrupted global trade. Tehran assumed — correctly — that Western forces had used Gulf airspace and bases to launch their campaigns. By striking back weeks later, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi moved beyond self-defense. They signaled that hosting Western infrastructure would no longer mean absorbing blows without response. The strikes were retaliatory but also symbolic, demonstrating that Gulf states would not remain passive targets in a war threatening their sovereignty and economic lifelines.

The new posture is affirmative rather than defensive. Saudi Arabia's retaliation is driven in part by a desire to protect its multi-trillion-dollar Vision 2030 portfolio from blackmail; the UAE operates under a tighter margin of error still, since a sustained drone campaign against its aviation, tourism, and financial hubs would devastate the Emirati economic model. By striking Iran directly, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh are insulating themselves against vulnerability, calculating that proactive deterrence is safer than passive exposure.

This recalibration is multidimensional. Militarily, Gulf states are signaling to Tehran that aggression will be met with force. Diplomatically, they continue to engage external powers — Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and Islamabad — ensuring no single actor dominates their security environment. Economically, they diversify partnerships across Asia and Europe to reduce dependence on any single corridor. Strategically, they walk a line between deterrence and diplomacy, projecting strength while leaving the door open to mediation. The strikes embody this logic of calculated maneuvering. They are not declarations of war but measured signals: enough to demonstrate capability, not enough to trigger full escalation.

To grasp how striking a departure this is, consider the long arc of Iranian-Gulf relations. Before the 1979 revolution, the relationship was shaped by a mix of rivalry, cooperation, and shifting alliances under the Shah. Iran positioned itself as the dominant Gulf power, backed by U.S. and British support and an aggressive military buildup that unnerved the smaller monarchies. Tehran's modern claim to Bahrain — pressed forcefully through the 1960s before the Shah accepted the 1970 UN referendum and recognized Bahraini independence in 1971 — left a lingering mistrust that survived the regime that produced it. Iran's seizure of Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs from the UAE in 1971, also under the Shah, set a precedent for territorial assertion that remains unresolved today.

Yet the pre-1979 era was not defined solely by confrontation. The Shah cultivated ties with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies through shared opposition to Arab nationalist movements and the Soviet Union. Riyadh and Tehran functioned as parallel pillars of U.S. regional strategy, aligning against Nasser's Egypt and later Baathist Iraq under American patronage. Oil diplomacy ran in parallel: Iran and Saudi Arabia coordinated within OPEC to stabilize markets, though competition for influence was constant. Territorial disputes on one hand, strategic alignment on the other — an uneasy balance ruptured by the 1979 revolution, when ideological hostility replaced pragmatic rivalry.

Tehran's revolutionary export followed a consistent pattern: asymmetric pressure through proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain, and Yemen; periodic threats to close the Strait of Hormuz; tanker harassment during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, when the spillover into the Gulf became known as the Tanker War and threatened the lifeline of Gulf economies. Through every cycle, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait relied heavily on U.S. naval protection and avoided direct strikes on Iranian territory despite repeated provocations. The lesson institutionalized in Gulf capitals was that survival depended on external guarantees.

That lesson held into the 1990s and 2000s, as Iran expanded its proxy networks while periodically threatening Hormuz, and Gulf states deepened ties with Washington, invested in advanced defense systems, and cautiously engaged Tehran in diplomacy — including the Beijing-brokered rapprochement of 2023. The underlying imbalance remained: Iran wielded asymmetric tools of disruption, while the Gulf relied on deterrence by alliance. The 2026 strikes are the first decisive break with that pattern.

The Gulf-Washington alignment driving that break is best understood through what Russian strategic thinkers, beginning with Vladimir Lefebvre in the 1960s and later elaborated in Western analysis by Timothy Thomas, called reflexive control— the practice of shaping an adversary's perceptions through deliberate contradiction, adaptive signaling, and self-reinforcing narratives, such that the adversary internalizes a distorted picture of the strategic environment and acts against its own interests. Trump's contradictory pronouncements on Iran — alternating between threats of total war and offers of negotiation, often within the same news cycle — are the operational signature of this approach. Whether intuitive or designed, they force Tehran to plan for incompatible scenarios simultaneously, dispersing its decision-making and depriving it of the strategic monopoly on ambiguity it has historically enjoyed.

The Iranian regime is structurally vulnerable to this mirroring. On March 7, in a pre-recorded televised address, President Masoud Pezeshkian apologized to the Gulf states and pledged that their territories would not be targeted unless attacks originated from them. The pledge was undercut within hours — strikes on Doha and other Gulf cities continued through the day — and within forty-eight hours Pezeshkian himself was forced into a partial climbdown after IRGC commanders and clerical hardliners denounced the apology as, in lawmaker Hamid Rasai's words, "unprofessional, weak and unacceptable." The episode revealed Tehran speaking with multiple voices simultaneously: diplomatic conciliation from the presidency, military escalation from the IRGC, ideological repudiation from the clerical establishment. Reflexive control works against an adversary whose own messaging is already fractured.

The Gulf states are not passive recipients of this strategy; they are amplifying it. Reuters reported in mid-May that Saudi Arabia carried out covert strikes on Iranian territory in late March, citing Western and Iranian officials, and noted that Riyadh's diplomatic channel with Tehran ran in parallel with the strikes — Iranian attack volume against the kingdom declined even as Saudi munitions were landing inside Iran. The Wall Street Journal followed with confirmation that the UAE was responsible for the April 8 Lavan Island strike, timed to within hours of Trump's announcement of a conditional ceasefire. Neither government has confirmed or denied. The UAE foreign ministry has invoked its "right to respond to hostile acts with military measures to protect its security" — a formulation that neither acknowledges Lavan nor permits it to be ruled out. UAE presidential adviser Anwar Gargash has gone further, publicly opposing any ceasefire that fails to deliver "a long-term solution for security in the Persian Gulf." Reports through March and April variously placed Gulf leaders as urging Washington to halt the war, urging it to continue, and urging postponement; the contradictions are not noise from inconsistent sourcing but a feature of how Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have chosen to communicate. The pattern — strikes paired with diplomatic engagement, action paired with official non-acknowledgment, public positioning paired with deliberately incompatible signaling — is the operational footprint of Gulf governments running their own reflexive strategy, not merely benefiting from Washington's.

For Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, this serves two purposes. It embeds their actions within a broader strategic framework, reducing the risk of isolation and ensuring their moves are interpreted as part of a coordinated effort rather than rogue initiatives. And it allows them to project agency: they are not pawns in Washington's game but co-authors of a strategy that leverages ambiguity to deter aggression. Contradiction becomes a tool of deterrence, signaling both resolve and flexibility, ensuring Tehran remains perpetually uncertain about what comes next.

The choreography rests on a deeper layer that has only recently come into public view: a sustained, private Gulf campaign to push Washington beyond containment toward a more decisive posture against Tehran. The Washington Post reportedon February 28 that Trump's decision to launch the opening strikes followed weeks of lobbying by what the paper described as an unusual pair of allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, citing four people familiar with the matter. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman placed multiple private calls to the president in the preceding month, and Saudi Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman pressed U.S. officials in Washington against inaction; U.S. intelligence assessments at the time saw no imminent Iranian threat to the mainland. The New York Times subsequently reported that MBS has remained in regular contact with Trump throughout the war, urging continued military pressure and warning against any agreement that would leave the Iranian government and its missile programs substantively intact — invoking, according to the report, late King Abdullah's 2010 phrase about "cutting off the head of the snake." The Associated Press has since reported that officials from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain have privately conveyed to the White House that they do not want the operation to end short of significant changes in Iranian leadership or a dramatic shift in Iranian behavior.

Riyadh has publicly denied the lobbying reports — embassy spokesman Fahad Nazer issued a statement within forty-eight hours of the Post account saying that "at no point" did the kingdom urge the president "to adopt a different policy." The denial is itself the pattern: private pressure paired with public moderation, action paired with disavowal. The UAE has run the more affirmative line. Emirati officials have publicly criticized regional partners for failing to respond more forcefully to Iranian attacks, executed the Lavan strike, and moved to exit OPEC during the conflict — a posture noticeably closer to Washington and Jerusalem than to its Gulf neighbors. Saudi Arabia has been more dual-track, balancing private advocacy for sustained American pressure with public emphasis on diplomacy, covert strikes against Iran with back-channel diplomacy that produced documented reductions in Iranian fire against the kingdom. The visible divergence between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi — over OPEC, over the Houthi question, over Red Sea exposure — does not weaken the reflexive doctrine. It refines it. Two distinct Gulf signaling strategies, neither cleanly disavowable, leave Tehran modeling not one adversary but several, each operating on a different axis of plausible deniability.

Crossing the threshold of striking Iranian soil alters deterrence dynamics. Iran has long warned that any Gulf state hosting U.S. bases or facilitating attacks would be treated as a legitimate target; by acting directly, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have removed any plausible-deniability cover from Tehran's targeting calculus. Oil infrastructure, ports, and religious gatherings such as the Hajj could become politicized and vulnerable. The Strait of Hormuz blockade already threatens energy security worldwide, and Gulf strikes deepen uncertainty in oil markets. The escalation also dismantles the diplomatic architecture cultivated by Beijing, effectively tearing up the 2023 Saudi-Iran rapprochement and forcing China to choose between its principal energy suppliers. Prolonged conflict risks drawing in Russian electronic warfare and air defense support for Tehran, and extends the theater to the Bab al-Mandab Strait, where Iranian leverage through Houthi proxies could close a second chokepoint on global trade. Preventing a dual maritime stranglehold — Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab — is now as central to Gulf strategy as deterring direct strikes.

Several trajectories are possible. Continued Gulf strikes could transform the region into a full theater of war, with Iran escalating against oil fields, ports, and religious gatherings; for Riyadh, this carries existential domestic risk as the Hajj season approaches. Halting direct strikes and pursuing diplomacy would reduce risks to Gulf infrastructure but force Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to accept limits on their newfound assertiveness. The hybrid approach already in evidence — covert or deniable operations alongside public diplomacy — allows Gulf states to project strength without full escalation, though ambiguity carries dangers, as miscalculation could trigger Iranian retaliation regardless of deniability.

The Gulf's awakening is not a simple rupture, nor a fleeting tactic of deception. It is the codification of ambiguity into doctrine. By striking Iranian soil while issuing contradictory signals, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have transformed reflexivity into the architecture of deterrence — projecting strength while preserving deniability, signaling resolve while retaining flexibility. The historic transformation is not the use of force across the Gulf; it is that deterrence is no longer outsourced, but redefined through the strategic manipulation of doubt.

The implications run past the immediate conflict. The Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iran rapprochement of 2023 is functionally dead, overtaken by a Gulf posture that treats Tehran as an active adversary rather than a manageable rival, and that China cannot mediate without choosing between its principal energy suppliers. The post-ceasefire architecture now being negotiated through Pakistani mediation will have to accommodate not just American security guarantees and Iranian red lines, but Gulf governments that have demonstrated they will act on their own — and that may keep acting, deniably, when their interests demand it. The smaller GCC states — Qatar, Oman, Kuwait — face the consequences without having joined the action, a divergence within the bloc that the previous era of collective hedging concealed. Whether the new doctrine produces stability or a more dangerous equilibrium will depend less on Iran's response than on whether Riyadh and Abu Dhabi can sustain controlled ambiguity without losing control of it.

Ahmed Khuzaei is the managing partner of Political Consultancy firm “Khuzaie Associates LLC.” He also serves as an expert with the N7 Foundation, contributing analysis on Gulf affairs and the evolving landscape of the Abraham Accords. He is an Ambassador for BPUR at the United Nations and the White House.

Russia has spent the past several years expanding its nuclear footprint across the Middle East. While most attention has focused on Rosatom’s projects in Iran and Turkey, the state corporation has also pushed deeper into other major regional markets. The result is a layered web of strategic interdependencies that gives Moscow flexible geopolitical leverage in a region where its other instruments of influence have weakened.

For Russia, nuclear energy is one of the more durable instruments of global power projection. From Africa to Central Asia to Southeast Asia, Rosatom has captured a dominant share of new nuclear construction at a moment when the demand for stable, low-carbon baseload is rising. Renewables remain attractive, but their rollout is uneven. Nuclear is increasingly framed as both safe and long-term. Rosatom presents itself as more than a builder, exporting digital tools, small modular reactors, and advanced fuel-cycle services as part of a broader package of technological modernization.

Cooperatoin with Iran

Iran remains Rosatom’s anchor client. In September 2025, the two sides inked a memorandum of cooperation on the construction of small nuclear power plants in the Islamic Republic. Iran’s stated goal, according to AEOI head Mohammad Eslami, is eight nuclear power plants generating 20GW of electricity by 2040. Implementation will involve a series of follow-on agreements between Rosatom and AEOI on design and construction. Tehran has proposedconstructing large-capacity units at a new site, in addition to the Bushehr NPP, and exploring the possibility of constructing small nuclear power plants. Russia is expected to build RITM-200 reactors with a capacity of 50-60 MW,utilizing similar technology as what has been long used in its nuclear icebreaker fleet.

The choice of smaller reactors is not incidental. After Iran’s confrontations with Israel — first the June 2025 strikes and then the joint US-Israeli offensive launched in February 2026 — the Iranian leadership appears to favor smaller, more dispersed plants that are harder to characterize as strategic targets. The presence of Russian personnel and Russian-supplied technology may also raise the political cost of any future strike, though Russia-Israel ties have cooled considerably in recent years and that calculus is no longer what it once was.

Just two days after the small-reactor MoU, on 26 September 2025, Iran and Rosatom signed a far larger contract: a $25 billion deal for four 1,255 MW reactors at Sirik, in Hormozgan province, also known as the Hormoz nuclear plant. The agreement was concluded hours before the UN snapback sanctions on Iran took effect, lending it both commercial and political weight. Russia is also continuing construction of two additional VVER-1000 reactors at Bushehr (Bushehr-2), with completion currently targeted for 2029-31, though Western sanctions and component shortages have repeatedly slowed work.

Russia prides itself on having built Bushehr-1, the first civilian nuclear power plant in the Middle East. The originalcontract with Atomstroyexport was signed in January 1995. In the difficult years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bushehr helped revive Russia’s struggling nuclear sector: roughly 300 Russian enterprises and research institutes — including Atomenergoproekt and the Kurchatov Institute — were involved in the project. Construction stretched through the 2000s; the reactor reached criticality in May 2011, was connected to the grid that September, and entered commercial operation in 2013. In November 2014, Russia and Iran signed an additional protocol envisioning four moreunits at the Bushehr site and four more at a separate, undisclosed location. Work on the second reactor, Bushehr-2, has since progressed slowly, hampered by Western sanctions on Iran and broader geopolitical instability in the Middle East.

The current US-Israel war on Iran has hampered, but not severed, nuclear cooperation between Moscow and Tehran. On April 9, Rosatom CEO Alexey Likhachev said that roughly 128 staff remained at Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant and that further evacuations were planned. By April 20, Likhachev confirmed in Tashkent that more than 600 personnel had been evacuated to Russia via Armenia, with only about 20 volunteers left on site, and pledged that construction at new Iranian facilities would resume “as quickly as possible” once the fighting ends.

Turkey, Egypt, and Beyond:

In Turkey, Rosatom is constructing the Akkuyu nuclear power plant. Valued at approximately $20 billion, the project is being delivered under a Build-Own-Operate mode, with Rosatom retaining ownership and operational control. Once all four 1,200 MW units are online, Akkuyu is expected to supply about 10 percent of Turkey’s electricity. The first unit is due to be commissioned in 2026, with the remaining units phased in through 2028.

A similar dynamic is visible in Egypt, where Rosatom is constructing the El Dabaa nuclear power plant. Backed by Russian state loans, El Dabaa is a cornerstone of Egypt’s energy diversification strategy. Its symbolic weight is also considerable: Cairo is willing to maintain and expand strategic ties with Moscow despite Western pressure.

Beyond these three anchor projects, Rosatom is steadily working to widen its regional footprint. In January 2026, the company offered the UAE its full product line of large and small, land-based and floating reactors, and the UAE has separately been discussed as a potential investor in third-country Rosatom projects, including Akkuyu. Memoranda of cooperation are also in place with Saudi Arabia and Iraq, with Iraq finalizing a 2024 MoU on the peaceful use of nuclear energy and developing nuclear-education ties with Russian institutions. The 2015 Jordan-Rosatom deal for a $10 billion two-unit plant was scrapped in 2018, but Amman and Moscow have since reorganized cooperation around small modular reactors — a shift that fits the broader pattern of Rosatom recalibrating to local fiscal and political conditions.

For the Middle East governments, Rosatom is a way to diversify their nuclear partnerships beyond Western and Chinese suppliers. It comes without the political conditionality often attached to Western contracts, and it offers something Western and even Chinese vendors struggle to match: a full-service package spanning construction, fuel supply, training, regulatory support, and spent-fuel management. Rosatom's flexibility — across reactor sizes, deployment models, and financing arrangements — also fits regional capitals' preference for what is increasingly described as multi-alignment.

For Moscow, expanding Rosatom’s regional presence is part of a wider pivot toward the Global South in the wake of Russia’s near-total rupture with the West after 2022. Nuclear projects suit this aspiration well. They lock recipient countries into multi-decade dependencies on Russian technology, fuel, and expertise, and they generate diffuse soft power dividends through training programs and information campaigns shaping local opinion in Moscow’s favor.

For now, Rosatom’s influence in the Middle East is likely to persist and potentially expand. Sanctions have raised costs and slowed schedules, but neither American nor European nuclear companies are yet able to match Rosatom’s financing or its full package offer. Chinese companies, however are bridging the gap. In Central Asia, the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) now successfully competes with Rosatom; a similar dynamic might eventually reach the Middle East. But that is a future contest. The present picture is striking: with the Assad dynasty gone in Syria and Iran’s conventional power humbled by Israel and the United States, Russia’s regional posture should by all expectations be unraveling. Rosatom’s expanding pipelines tell a different story — one in Moscow has shown itself capable of substituting nuclear contracts for the military and political instruments it has lost.

Emil Avdaliani is a Research Fellow at the Turan Research Center and a professor of international relations at the European University in Tbilisi, Georgia. His research focuses on the history of the Silk Roads and the interests of great powers in the Middle East and the Caucasus.

Moscow's policy toward Armenia in the run-up to the crucial parliamentary elections in Armenia on June 7 has shifted from mere irritation to practical pressure.

Russia is no longer simply expressing dissatisfaction with Armenia's leadership's attempts to build closer ties with the West, but is actively trying to raise the cost of that turn for Armenian society.

Russia has been clear that closer ties with the EU may bring political symbolism and Western diplomatic support, but remaining inside Russia-led structures brings Armenia cheap gas, market access, labor mobility, and economic stability.

Read the full article on The Kyiv Independent.

Emil Avdaliani is a Research Fellow at the Turan Research Center.

Israel’s defenders have warned for years that the United Nations, an institution that lectures democracies while shielding dictators, has been bent into a weapon against the Jewish state.

This week, the evidence hit — and it’s worse than even the cynics imagined.

It turns out that the United Nations and the global “human rights” apparatus writ large have been hijacked by bad actors intent on subverting the United States, its allies and the West as a whole.

And their antisemitism has been the pungent whiff of gas signaling a dangerous leak.

On Tuesday, the Geneva-based group UN Watch released “From Watchdogs to Ideologues,” a 104-page investigation into 13 of the UN’s 59 Special Rapporteurs — the supposedly independent human-rights monitors whose findings are routinely treated as authoritative by the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, Western governments and Western media.

The picture is damning.

Read the full article on The New York Post.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

For decades, Moscow’s power in the South Caucasus rested on military presence, conflict-management formats, energy leverage, and economic influence.

This is now under visible strain. Armenia is actively engaging the European Union (EU), Azerbaijan has grown significantly more assertive in its foreign policy, while Georgia is deepening selective economic links with China and the Middle East, while abstaining from restoring diplomatic ties with Russia.

Yet of the three countries, this trend is most visible in Armenia. It is Armenia that was closest to the Kremlin right up to the point when its supposed friend stood idly by during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and the eventual fall of the entity in September 2023. The logic had been that Armenia needed Russian aid should something happen to Karabakh, a logic that evaporated after defeat.

Extensive engagement with the EU should be seen from this perspective, with the events of early May in Yerevan only underlining the trend. Armenia hosted the European Political Community summit on May 4, followed by the first-ever EU-Armenia summit on May 5. The sides launched a €200m ($232m) partnership, while EU investments in Armenia under the Global Gateway strategy are expected to reach €2.5bn.

Read the full article on CEPA.

Emil Avdaliani is a Research Fellow at the Turan Research Center.

Research Fellow Hussain Ehsani spoke to Sky News Arabia for a feature on the spread of child-selling among Afghan families, a practice that has accelerated sharply since the Taliban's return to power in 2021. The report cites estimates that as many as 121,000 children have been traded or sold since August 2021, with open sales now documented in markets in northern provinces such as Jowzjan, where children are reportedly priced between $1,000 and $2,000 depending on age.

Ehsani told Sky News Arabia that the practice is not new — it existed even under the previous republican government — but emphasized that it has expanded sharply under the current crisis. He attributed part of the surge to Afghanistan's economic collapse: the absence of job opportunities, a broken economic system, and the lack of any state plan to develop rural areas have pushed families in the countryside to seek alternative means of survival, including selling their children.

But Ehsani argued that the phenomenon cannot be explained by economics alone. It is also rooted in tribal culture and social structures, he said, where village elders and tribal sheikhs continue to issue customary rulings to resolve legal and financial disputes between individuals. Among the remedies these notables sometimes propose is the sale of a young child to settle outstanding debts or end a dispute. The practice, Ehsani concluded, is the product of interrelated economic, cultural, and social factors.

Read the full article on Sky News Arabic.

Hussain Ehsani is a Research Fellow at the Turan Research Center.