As Iran keeps the Strait of Hormuz closed, it is borrowing from Ukraine’s playbook.

Dubai – After President Trump he retracted his threat to “destroy” Iran’s energy infrastructure if it refuses to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping lane that remains effectively closed to ships not given express permission by Tehran.

As the U.S. and its allies weigh how to get oil and other vital supplies from the crisis again, there is a growing question: Even if thousands more US forces headed for the region, can anywhere soldiers doing work?

The ongoing four-year war in Ukraine suggests the answer may be, no.

When Russia launched its full-scale offensive in 2022, Ukraine’s military presence in the Black Sea was smaller than Russia’s, but Kyiv was able to repel one of the world’s most powerful ships.

Using explosive maritime drones and land-launched ballistic missiles, Ukrainian forces have damaged or destroyed several Russian ships and forced others to withdraw from key naval positions.

In April 2022, Ukraine sank the flagship of Russia’s formidable Black Sea Fleet, the missile cruiser Moskva, using arrows made in Ukraine. Since then, Ukraine has launched several attacks on Russian ships, often using very cheap drones.

“Ukraine doesn’t really have a navy,” Yaroslav Trofimov, a Ukrainian-Italian writer, Middle East expert and senior foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, told CBS News. Nevertheless, he said, Ukraine “managed to prevent the Russian Black Sea Fleet from even entering the western part of the Black Sea.”

And Ukraine’s disruption of Russian activity does not stop at its warships. According to UN data, Moscow’s grain sales fell by more than half at one point as its Black Sea ports were effectively closed for months.

Ukraine did not control the Black Sea, but it made parts of it too dangerous for Russia to use.

President Trump has repeatedly said that Iran’s navy is “gone,” destroyed in the war, but Iran appears to be taking a page 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 Persian Gulf war had made clear: In modern unmanned warfare, large, expensive ships can be great targets for cheap, unmanned weapons.

Or as Trofimov put it while speaking to CBS News from his current home in Dubai, modern naval warfare is increasingly “ruled by unmanned systems.”

“Iran is studying the lessons of the war in Ukraine carefully,” said Trofimov, who spoke extensively about the war in Ukraine.

Those systems include small drones that can be difficult to capture, digitally or with conventional weapons.

“They don’t have a big warhead,” he said. “But it’s big enough to cover the ship.”

In previous conflicts, including the “Tanker War” of 1987-88 when Iran laid sea mines to block traffic, the US Navy escorted tankers to the Persian Gulf.

That may not work today.

“Standing with tanks doesn’t help much when you’re dealing with drones,” Trofimov told CBS News. “A drone … is just a flying mine.”

The US has not attempted to escort any ships in the Strait of Hormuz during the voyage current conflict.

Meanwhile, Iran has floating demands that would give it full control over the crisis – making it a private “paying ground” for the Islamic Republic, Trofimov said, something the US and its Gulf allies are likely to accept.

The Black Sea and the Strait of Hormuz are very different bodies of water, but the pattern is starting to look familiar: The most foreign powers use the cheapest equipment and the same tactics to frustrate and overwhelm a better-armed enemy – and we don’t even need to win outright, but simply raise the risk level of any movement in the battlefield.

The US and Israel say they have killed more than 20,000 Iranians since the war began. And in small military terms, Iran seems to be losing. But as the closure of the strait keeps fuel prices rising, it has a knock-on effect, raising the cost of consumer goods around the world, and Iran appears to be winning economically.