KYIV, Ukraine – Russia has begun sending Iran upgraded munitions, satellite imagery and targeting data used against American forces in the Middle East, part of a broader military partnership that also includes a covert program to help Tehran develop supersonic and hypersonic cruise missiles, according to intelligence assessments made public this month.
Tehran and Moscow have been deepening their military relationship since the 1990s, but the partnership accelerated sharply after 2022 when Iran first began supplying Russia with Shahed attack drones for use in Ukraine.
The Kremlin has since negotiated a license to build the Iranian-designed drones on Russian territory and has rapidly learned to replace and often upgrade most of the weapon’s components with locally sourced and Chinese parts.
Now, as Iran wages its own war against the United States and Israel since the spring, Russia’s upgraded technology is flowing back into Tehran, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
“If confirmed, this would represent a complete technological feedback loop in which Iranian‑designed drones supplied to Russia were enhanced through extensive wartime use before being returned to Iran in a significantly more capable configuration,” ISW analysts found.
That exchange marks a shift toward a more interdependent military partnership between Russia and Iran that is already endangering American forces deployed throughout the Middle East and beyond, according to American and Ukrainian officials – including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who said he had given evidence of the alliance to the White House in March.
“There’s definitely some action there,” Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told a Senate hearing in April when asked whether Russia was actively supporting Iran’s war effort against U.S. forces.
Iran shipped its first Shahed‑136 and Shahed‑131 drones to Russia in mid‑August 2022, six months into the full‑scale invasion of Ukraine, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
About two months later, a Russian defense‑industry delegation traveled to Iran to finalize a $1.75 billion deal authorizing production of the drone on Russian soil at the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan – initially assembling Iranian‑supplied kits, then increasingly substituting Russian and Chinese components.
Over the next four years, Russian engineers turned the imported design into a seemingly different weapon, swapping the original Iranian engine for Chinese turbojets, adding mesh-network radios and air-to-air missiles, and ultimately introducing entirely new jet-powered airframes (on the Geran-4 and Geran-5) so that the drone no longer resembles its original propeller-driven design.
“The country that has most thoroughly mastered the Shahed is not the one that built it,” CSIS researchers found. “Russia has used its license‑built variant, designated the ‘Geran,’ as a base platform for unprecedented wartime iteration.”
Russian missile specialists have been helping Iran develop ramjet propulsion systems for supersonic and hypersonic cruise missiles since 2023 through a covert program codenamed C430L, according to a Financial Times investigation published Sept. 1.
The two countries formalized their partnership by signing a 20-year strategic treaty in 2025 covering joint military exercises, intelligence-sharing and defense-industrial cooperation, according to Reuters.
Russian-provided targeting intelligence “raises concerns that future Iranian drone attacks could become substantially more sophisticated than previous campaigns,” according to ISW.
Satellite imagery from early September shows the construction of at least ten new facilities at Alabuga, according to ISW, and Ukrainian intelligence says Russia plans to produce thousands of additional Geran drones and decoy munitions in September alone – with jet-powered models on track to make up roughly 80% of all drone attacks by November, according to RBC-Ukraine.
Those production figures would give Russia ample capacity to continue supplying both its own war in Ukraine and Iran’s long‑range strike campaign against American aircraft carriers and warships in the Middle East for several more months.
“Iran’s development and operationalization of this technology would likely improve its ability to threaten US land and naval assets in the region,” ISW concluded, warning of threats to U.S. bases, command centers, logistics hubs, ammunition depots and naval infrastructure.
Katie Livingstone is the Ukraine correspondent for Defense News and Military Times. Based in Kyiv, she has covered Russia’s full-scale invasion since its first days. She is a former Fulbright fellow whose award-winning work has appeared in outlets across Europe and the U.S.
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