After President Trump backed off his threat to “obliterate” Iran’s energy infrastructure if it refused to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping lane remains effectively closed to vessels not granted explicit permission by Tehran.
As the U.S. and its allies weigh how to get oil and other critical supplies moving through the strait again, there’s a growing question: Even with thousands more U.S. forces heading for the region, can any military force do the job?
The four-year war still raging in Ukraine suggests the answer may be, no.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s military presence on the Black Sea was dwarfed by Russia’s, but Kyiv managed to push back one of the world’s most powerful fleets.
Using exploding sea and aerial drones and missiles launched from land, Ukrainian forces have damaged or destroyed numerous Russian ships and forced others away from key areas in the sea.
In April 2022, Ukraine sank the flagship of Russia’s formidable Black Sea Fleet, the missile cruiser Moskva, using Ukrainian-made missiles. Since then, Ukraine has launched a number of devastating attacks on Russian ships, often using much cheaper drones.
“Ukraine doesn’t really have a navy,” Yaroslav Trofimov, a Ukrainian-Italian author, Middle East expert and chief foreign-affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, told CBS News. Nonetheless, he said, Ukraine has “been able to prevent the Russian Black Sea Fleet from even entering the western half of the Black Sea.”
And Ukraine’s disruption of Russian activity has not stopped at its warships. According to U.N. data, Moscow’s grain exports fell by more than half at one point as its ports on the Black Sea were effectively shut down for months.
Ukraine did not take control of the Black Sea, but it made parts of it too dangerous for Russia to use.
President Trump has said repeatedly that Iran’s navy is “gone,” destroyed in the war, but Iran appears to be taking a page right out of Ukraine’s playbook when it comes to the Strait of Hormuz.
Even before the current conflict, U.S. military officials had acknowledged what the war in the Persian Gulf has made painfully clear: In modern asymmetrical warfare, large, expensive ships can be big targets for cheap, unmanned weapons.