‘I told you so’: Ukrainian envoy laments past Israeli refusal to collaborate on countering Iran-made drones

Michael Bachner is a news editor at The Times of Israel

Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel Yevgen Korniychuk speaks during a conference in Jaffa, June 7, 2022. (Avshalom Sassoni‎‏/Flash90)
Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel Yevgen Korniychuk speaks during a conference in Jaffa, June 7, 2022. (Avshalom Sassoni‎‏/Flash90)

Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel laments that Israel did not take up past offers by Kyiv to collaborate on countering Iran-made drones, a day after a Hezbollah UAV crashed into an IDF base, killing four and injuring dozens.

“I don’t want to say now, ‘I told you so,’ but I told you so,” Yevgen Korniychuk tells the Ynet news site. “It has long been clear to me that we are fighting the same enemy. I can say that after the attack on Israel that happened on October 7, [2023], Israel woke up, but there is much more do to.”

He says that in the past six months, Ukraine’s drone interception rate has been between 80 percent and 90%.

Israel has struggled to deal with the drone threat throughout the current war. It was Hamas drones that first crossed from Gaza on the morning of October 7, 2023, to disable electronic monitoring systems and pave the way for the massive cross-border onslaught. And the situation has gotten worse with Hezbollah drones, which periodically manage to evade Israel’s air defenses.

Figures released today show that over the course of the war, some 1,200 drones have been fired at Israel by Iran-backed terror groups, and 221 have gotten through Israel’s defenses.

Ukraine, which since Russia’s invasion in early 2022 has itself been dealing with Iran-made drones, offered Israel military and technological cooperation in February 2023, with Korniychuk even bringing drone shards to senior Israeli officials as part of his extensive attempts to convince the Jewish state to take a much stronger stance in favor of Kyiv and against Moscow, but Israel rebuffed these overtures, Hebrew media reported at the time.

In June 2023, Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak told The Times of Israel that “nobody but Israel can provide equipment to combat attacks by Iranian drones.”

At the time, Korniychuk told Channel 12 news, “Tomorrow, you may experience the same Iranian drone attack here.” In October 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the network: “We are fighting against Iran each day, 400 attacks of Iranian drones on our people, civilians, infrastructure. We gave information to Israel and we said ‘help us with air defenses’… We can join against this evil on air defense.”

Most Popular