Ukraine's decision to strike Iranian-linked vessels in the Caspian Sea this weekend is turning two separate wars into one, commentator Mark Ames argued.

“Zelensky bombed the Iranian vessel on the Caspian for the same reason his people paid Loomer to come to Kyiv and interview him: a PR campaign to try to win over Trump,” Ames said, a long-time Russia reporter and analyst. “If attacking Iran widens the war, so much the better: it means Ukraine is at war with Trump's enemy.”

Ukrainian drones struck the sanctioned cargo ships Port Olya-2 and Begey and a Project 12418 Molniya-class missile boat in the Caspian Sea on July 25, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, part of what Kyiv describes as a supply network moving Iranian ammunition, artillery shells, body armour and Shahed-drone components to Russia. Iran's foreign ministry said the strike killed one sailor and injured another aboard an Iranian commercial vessel, and summoned Ukraine's acting chargé d'affaires to protest what it called a hostile and criminal act.

The Caspian had, until now, been one of the few bodies of water Russia could use largely undisturbed – landlocked, far from Ukraine's borders and ringed by states that have stayed out of the war. Ukraine's willingness to strike there regardless marks a deliberate widening of its own war aims to include Iran, rather than an accident of geography.

After a rocky start, the relationship between Zelenskiy and Trump has dramatically improved in recent months as the White House appears to have given up on doing business with Russia and is now intent on ending the wars in Iran and Ukraine ahead of key midterm elections in November. Zelenskiy himself said the relationship began to improve at a tête-à-tête between the two presidents at the Vatican in January and cuominated with Trump granting Ukraine a license to make Patriot missiles earlier this month.

Zelenskiy paired the strikes with an intelligence disclosure: he said Ukraine has recorded Russia running satellite surveillance of US military facilities and Gulf states since the start of July, with the imagery subsequently turning up inside Iran and correlating with Iranian strikes on those sites – including, he said, four air bases in the Russian satellites' area of interest on July 19-20 alone, two in Bahrain, one in Jordan and one in Kuwait.

“I will instruct our intelligence to share with our partners the information we have,” he said, framing the disclosure as evidence Russia is actively helping Iran fight the US and its regional allies.

Russia is effectively blockading Ukraine's Black Sea coast by attacking port infrastructure and shipping to make Ukraine a “de facto landlocked state”. It’s the same tactic, in reverse, say analysts, that Ukraine has now brought to the Caspian and part of the wider brutal tit-for-tat missile war that has been escalating in the last months.

The conflict aimed at shipping is also escalating rapidly. Russia warned all vessels of the danger of navigating its Black Sea exclusive economic zone after a run of Ukrainian drone strikes on Moscow-linked shipping, while Kyiv urged shipping firms to suspend calls at Russian Black Sea ports altogether given the deteriorating security situation. The port of Odesa, which handles 90% of seabourn trade, has been completely shut down due to not only missile strikes, but in the last days, the deployment of Russia’s massively destructive FAB glide bombs against which Ukraine has no means of defence whatsoever. Russia has not deployed glide bombs against Odesa until now.

Ukraine has also targeted Russian ports with sustained attacks on Primorsk and Ust-Luga in April. Now the Sheskharis terminal at Novorossiysk, Russia's largest Black Sea oil-export hub, has been targeted and halted tanker loading last week, paralysing roughly a fifth of Russian oil exports and putting a third of Russia's grain exports at risk since they also route through Novorossiysk; a parallel drone campaign against the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) terminal, which carries about 80% of Kazakhstan's oil exports, has cut Kazakh oil output by around a fifth. Kazakhstan has repeatedly had to publicly deny complicity in drone strikes launched from or transiting its territory.

The campaign is now drawing direct US pushback. Washington has told Kyiv it considers strikes on non-Russian-flagged tankers in the Black Sea “undesirable,” after a drone hit a vessel chartered by Chevron (NYSE: CVX) near Novorossiysk. Chevron holds a 15% stake in the CPC – which moves about 2% of global oil output – and owns half of Kazakhstan's giant Tengiz field, meaning Ukraine's widening maritime campaign is now colliding with US commercial interests as directly as it is with Iran's.

The knock-on effects are reaching civilian shipping and Ukraine's own coastline too. Ports that were still receiving four to five vessels a day on July 21 saw arrivals stop completely by July 22, Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotsky said, a pause he attributed to shipowners' own caution rather than any Ukrainian restriction; Kyiv has called a UN Security Council session for July 27 over the Black Sea attacks, warning they risk pushing up food prices across Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Ukraine has kept up its own pressure on Russian-held territory in parallel, hitting 17 more energy facilities in Crimea in the week to July 24 – 136 since the start of the month – which Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert Brovdy said cut the peninsula's electricity consumption by 42% year-on-year.

The Caspian is not an entirely new front: Israel struck an Iranian Caspian port used by Russia to supply arms and food back in March, and Turkmenistan rescued the crew of an Iranian ship sunk on the same arms-shipping corridor in January – but Ukraine's direct involvement this time, rather than Israel's, is what gives Ames' and Diesen's readings their force: two wars that had run on separate, if overlapping, tracks are now sharing combatants, targets and, increasingly, a single strategic logic, one that has now pulled in a third combatant's economic interests in the Black Sea as well.