By Dmitry Kuzyakin
The Western coalition's strategy of standoff strikes against Iranian infrastructure has failed to deliver the expected results. Rather than forcing Tehran's capitulation or triggering regime change, the United States and Israel have instead witnessed a rallying of Iranian society and encountered a technological surprise for which conventional militaries were wholly unprepared — according to a prominent Russian defence analyst writing in the Kremlin-aligned outlet Izvestia.
A Checkmate of Their Own Making
Writing in the Russian daily, Kuzyakin invokes the chess term zugzwang — a position in which every available move worsens the player's standing — to describe Washington and Tel Aviv's current predicament. Iran's mass deployment of drones and its effective stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz have created conditions where continuing the conflict carries unacceptable economic costs for the West, he argues.
Strikes on coalition partner facilities have generated acute regional tensions. Gulf monarchies are reportedly reconsidering the value of hosting American military bases, having come to the uncomfortable realisation that the technological advantage has shifted to Tehran. "While coalition politicians continue projecting confidence in victory, the number of effective moves available to them is rapidly shrinking," Kuzyakin writes.
The Nuclear Temptation
The article's most alarming assertion is that Western strategists, unable to wage a cost-effective war against Iran's cheap drone swarms, may attempt to artificially raise the stakes by introducing nuclear weapons into the conflict. Kuzyakin warns that the use of tactical nuclear weapons could come within months.
Yet even this escalation, he contends, would fail militarily. Nuclear strikes cannot halt drone production from dispersed, mobile manufacturing units. Civilian casualties and radioactive contamination would only entrench Iranian resistance, transforming the conflict into an existential war for survival.
"The greater danger is psychological," Kuzyakin warns. "For decades the world has been held together by an unspoken political taboo. But once the first tactical explosions occur and global elites see that 'the sky has not fallen', the deterrent factors will vanish — replaced by a dangerous illusion of impunity."
He invokes a BBC scenario titled "Who Is Prepared to Die for Daugavpils?", in which the path from a single localised strike to total nuclear exchange takes just six hours. Full-scale nuclear use, he concludes, would trigger a nuclear winter and planetary famine killing hundreds of millions, primarily in the world's poorest nations.
The "Three Leagues" of Modern Warfare
Kuzyakin attributes Western strategic miscalculation to a failure to grasp the structure of 21st-century military technology, which he divides into three tiers:
First League (Highest): Foundational capabilities requiring decades of state-level investment — nuclear arsenals, nuclear submarines, orbital systems, and intercontinental ballistic missiles
Second League: Conventional armaments — tanks, aircraft, air defence systems, and heavy drones; the traditional domain of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, where the US and Israel remain dominant
Third League: The new reality of the 21st century, where development cycles are measured in weeks and the core technology consists of cheap microcontrollers and open-source software
It is the Third League, he argues, that produced FPV drones, Shaheds, unmanned surface vessels, and smart minefields. Russia, he claims, is the only power represented across all three leagues. The Western defence industry, by contrast, prefers launching a single million-dollar missile over managing a swarm of thousands of cheap systems — and this is the coalition's fundamental vulnerability.
Iran's industrial base has been deliberately dispersed. Long-range drone production no longer depends on large, easily targetable logistical hubs, rendering carpet-bombing campaigns largely ineffective against the IRGC's operational capacity. The Pentagon's and IDF's faith in electronic warfare as a near-omnipotent countermeasure is, Kuzyakin warns, likely to prove a painful disappointment — Iran has deployed fibre-optic-guided FPV drones that are immune to jamming.
Call for Immediate De-escalation
Kuzyakin closes with a stark recommendation: the only rational course is immediate de-escalation. The coalition should acknowledge Tehran's tactical victory and open negotiations on Iranian terms. "This is the only scenario that guarantees our descendants will have a tomorrow," he writes.
The confrontation now unfolding, he predicts, will resemble cavalry charging machine-gun nests — a collision between the coalition's classical conventional war machine and an IRGC that has undergone full digital transformation. In a theatre where drone counts could reach into the millions, he argues, the outcome is not in doubt.