
Mala Grkinja
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BREAKING: UAE calls on all Gulf countries to strike Iran jointly for opening strait of Hormuz as soon as possible.









JUST IN: Iran just threatened to cut the undersea internet cables running through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. Ninety-five to ninety-seven percent of global internet traffic does not travel by satellite. It travels through physical glass fibres buried one to two metres beneath the seabed. Your bank transfers. Your stock trades. Your cloud computing. The data flows connecting every financial market on earth to every other financial market. All of it runs through cables laid across the same shallow waters where the IRGC is currently operating a selective toll regime and collecting yuan for passage. The cables at risk per TeleGeography: FALCON, Gulf Bridge International, Europe India Gateway, SEA-ME-WE 6, AAE-1, and FLAG in the Hormuz corridor. EIG, AAE-1, Seacom, SMW-4, SMW-5, SMW-6, IMEWE, and 2Africa Pearls in the Red Sea. These are not obscure regional links. They are the backbone of global digital commerce connecting Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The IRGC stated on March 28: “Critical infrastructure in Hormuz and Red Sea will not be spared if aggression continues.” No cable has been cut. Google and Meta have activated contingency rerouting. The threat is credible as asymmetric signaling but execution is high-risk and likely a bluff. Here is why. In 2008, eight cables were severed off the Egyptian coast. Seventy to eighty percent of Middle East-to-Europe traffic went dark. Repairs took three to eight weeks. In 2024, Houthi-related anchor drags in the Red Sea damaged four cables. Repairs took months. Both incidents were almost certainly accidental. Deliberate state-sponsored cable sabotage at scale has never been executed because the consequences are mutually destructive: Iran’s own connectivity depends on these same cables, and any confirmed cut would trigger immediate US, UK, and French naval retaliation from fleets already in theatre. But the threat itself is the weapon. Cable operators are rerouting. Rerouting costs money. Insurance on cable infrastructure is repricing. Every institution that relies on sub-40-millisecond latency between Asian and European financial centres is now running contingency scenarios that did not exist 28 days ago. The threat creates friction in the global financial plumbing without requiring a single fibre to be severed. And the beneficiary of the threat is sitting on a Trump-Modi phone call discussing Starlink India approval. Starlink’s LEO constellation of over 9,500 satellites provides resilient broadband via phased-array terminals that electronically steer narrow beams to avoid jamming. Iran has deployed GPS spoofing and RF noise against Starlink since January. Packet loss spiked to 30 to 80 percent. Starlink countered with firmware updates and beamforming nulls that reduced loss to usable levels. The arms race is real but Starlink is winning it. Starlink Maritime is already deployed on tankers rerouting around the Hormuz corridor. Major shipping lines are equipping vessels with flat-panel terminals delivering 100 to 220 megabits per second at 20 to 40 milliseconds latency. SpaceX is reportedly filing its IPO prospectus this week per Bloomberg, Reuters, and The Information, targeting a $1.5 to $1.75 trillion valuation in June. Filing into a war where the alternative to his product is glass fibres buried in contested seabed. The same strait carrying 20 percent of the world’s oil, 20 percent of its LNG, and one-third of its helium also carries 95 percent of the world’s data. Oil. Gas. Helium. Semiconductors. Fertilizer. Internet traffic. Yuan tolls. All flowing through or over 39 kilometres of water between Iran and Oman. One chokepoint. Every domain. The market has not priced the convergence. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…







JUST IN: Iran gave Russia its Shahed drones. Russia improved them in Ukraine. Now Western intelligence says Russia is shipping the upgraded versions back to Iran. And the country that learned how to kill those drones on the battlefield just sent 228 experts to the Gulf to teach five countries how to do the same thing. The full circle is extraordinary. Iran supplied thousands of Shahed-136 kamikaze drones to Russia starting in 2022 for use against Ukraine. Russia rebranded them Geran-2 and, over three years of combat, upgraded the navigation systems, added anti-jamming capabilities, improved the engines, and refined the payload delivery. The Financial Times and AP reported on March 26 citing Western intelligence that Russia is now in the final stages of shipping those upgraded Geran-2 drones back to Iran’s IRGC, along with medicine and food supplies. Kremlin spokesman Peskov called the reports “lies” and “fake news dumps.” Meanwhile, Zelensky arrived in Saudi Arabia on March 26 for an unannounced visit, met Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, signed a defense cooperation deal focused on air defense and drone expertise, and departed Jeddah on March 28. Ukraine has deployed 201 to 228 military drone specialists to five Gulf and Middle Eastern countries: the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan. Another 34 are ready per Zelensky’s statement on March 17. These specialists are not there as a symbolic gesture. They bring the single most effective counter to Shahed drones that exists anywhere on earth. Ukraine developed FPV interceptor drones that account for roughly 70 percent of all Shahed and Geran-2 shootdowns in Ukraine per Forces News and Atlantic Council reporting. The method: radar and acoustic sensors detect the incoming drone at 20 to 50 kilometres. A cheap, fast quadcopter or fixed-wing interceptor launches from a mobile platform. An operator pilots it at high speed toward the target. It destroys the Shahed through kamikaze collision or a small explosive payload on impact. Cost per intercept: a fraction of what a surface-to-air missile costs. Militarnyi reported on March 22 that Ukrainian teams have already confirmed multiple Shahed shootdowns in the Middle East. The arms race running through this war is now a closed loop. Iran builds the drone. Russia tests it, improves it, and allegedly sends the improved version back. Ukraine learns to kill it through three years of battlefield iteration. Ukraine exports that knowledge to the Gulf states Iran is attacking. The Gulf states pay Ukraine in money, technology, and diplomatic support. Russia denies everything while the drones fly in both directions. This is not a bilateral conflict. It is a global drone ecosystem where every improvement by one side is studied, countered, and re-exported by the other. The Shahed that hits a refinery in Bahrain tonight may carry Russian-upgraded navigation. The interceptor that destroys it may be piloted by a Ukrainian operator trained in Zaporizhzhia. The defense deal that funded the deployment was signed in Jeddah while the war it was designed to address raged 1,500 kilometres to the northeast. SpaceX’s Starlink provides the communications backbone for these teams in contested environments where terrestrial networks are degraded by the same war. The same helium shortage threatening semiconductor fabs and quantum computers is threatening the rocket launches that put Starlink satellites in orbit. The same strait carrying the oil carries the data cables that the drones are trying to protect. Every domain connects through the same 39 kilometres of water. Full analysis - open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…





