Iran Doubles Down on Arms for Russia

Iran is doubling down on military support for Russia in a series of new military deals that could prolong the war in Ukraine and offer sanction-battered Tehran new economic and defense lifelines, according to five U.S. and NATO officials familiar with the matter.

In public, top U.S. and allied leaders have castigated Iran for supplying Russia with drones and vowed to use everything in their power to block those shipments. But behind closed doors, officials concede that there are no realistic avenues to stem the flow of Iranian military goods into Russia for it to deploy to Ukraine.

“There’s unfortunately a limit to what we can do to stop this unholy alliance with sanctions alone,” said one senior Eastern European official who tracks the matter.

The question of what Washington and its allies can—or can’t—do to hamper cooperation between Moscow and Tehran serves as a litmus test for how it can cut off Russia from foreign military suppliers to help hasten the end of the war. With many of Russia’s military supplies running low and its defense industrial base squeezed by Western sanctions, Moscow is increasingly seeking outside help and arms transfers—from neighboring Belarus, from Iran and North Korea, and (possibly) from China—to stay in the fight in Ukraine.

The question over Iran’s support for Russia’s military has taken on a new sense of urgency for Western policymakers after Russian forces launched another salvo of Iranian-made drones in Ukraine this week. Although 11 of the 14 Iranian-made drones, most aimed at the capital city of Kyiv, were shot down, the latest strike signals that Russia will continue to find ways to prolong the war by targeting Ukrainian civilians well outside the military battlefields.

Moscow and Tehran have already advanced plans to build a drone factory inside Russia that could produce thousands of drones per year, the U.S. and NATO officials confirmed, detailing a plan first reported by the Wall Street Journal. In addition, the officials said, Russia is drumming up plans to provide Iran with advanced military fighter jets, helicopters, and air defense systems.

Iran and Russia have a long history of cooperating against Western powers, but experts have described it as a partnership borne of convenience in specific cases—and one laden with mutual distrust. But the new developments in Ukraine have pushed Russia to change that by deepening its ties with Tehran beyond previous levels, senior U.S. and other Western officials said.

Russia and Iran’s military alliance is “moving at a pretty fast clip in a very dangerous direction right now,” CIA Director William Burns told CBS News in a recent interview. “Russia is proposing to help the Iranians on their missile program and also at least considering the possibility of providing fighter aircraft to Iran as well.”

“That creates obvious risks not only for the people of Ukraine, and we’ve seen the evidence of that already, but also risks to our friends and partners across the Middle East as well,” Burns added.

The burgeoning alliance has caused alarm within NATO, including among European powers that have sought to keep an open dialogue with Iran to revive diplomatic negotiations over its nuclear weapons program. Iran is “now a regular part of our intel briefings” on the war in Ukraine, said one NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

For now, U.S. and NATO officials and independent experts said Iran’s military support for Russia would not be enough to turn the tide of the war in Russia’s favor, as Moscow struggles to regain the advantage in the face of effective and Western-backed Ukrainian resistance. But it could be enough to prolong the war and raise its death toll. The advancing pace of military cooperation between Moscow and Tehran could give Russian forces a fighting edge in specific cases on the battlefield and allow Russia to target more of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure with Iranian-made suicide drones as it runs low on its own precision-guided munitions.

“It’s not as if Iran has some massive military industrial base that can suddenly just spring to life,” said the NATO official. “But they do have industry. They do make some relatively cutting edge military equipment, and that can now flow to the Russians, which is bad—as any additional support for Russia is bad.”

In turn, Russian military support for Iran could give the country’s military additional advantages against any potential military confrontations with the United States or its allies in the Middle East. One U.S. official said if Russia were to supply Iran with advanced air defense systems, such as the S-300 or S-400 missile system, then it would help Tehran better protect its infrastructure for nuclear weapons from possible Israeli strikes.

“The ramifications go well beyond Ukraine,” the U.S. official said.

Other experts point to the threat of Russia providing higher-end technology to Iran to produce more effective and lethal drones. “Advanced Iranian drones built with the assistance of Russia will not just stay in Europe for use in Ukraine,” said Jonathan Lord, a scholar at the Center for a New American Security think tank. “Those are going to proliferate and find their way to targets back in the Middle East.”

The United States issued a raft of sanctions targeting Iranian drone companies in recent months in response to these developments—including executives at Qods Aviation Industries, an Iranian defense manufacturer that designs drones, and the head of Iran’s Aerospace Industries Organization. Last month, the United States sanctioned eight executives at the Iranian Paravar Pars Company, which manufactures the Shahed drones that Russia deploys in Ukraine. The U.S. Commerce Department also issued new export control measures last weekend specifically to target Iranian drones used by Russia in Ukraine in a bid to disrupt the flow of foreign products and technology that goes into producing those drones.

Lord said the sanctions and export controls may hamper the Russia-Iran military alliance, but they can’t stop it outright.

“You’re not going to stop this type of collaboration,” he said. “You can do things to try and slow it to make them less effective, but ultimately, these countries are fundamentally being pushed closer together by the nature of the conflict.”