ANALYSIS – Even as Joe Biden pays the Iranian terror regime billions of taxpayer dollars in ransom for five American hostages and gives Ukraine tens of billions of taxpayer dollars in aid to fight Russia, Iran is helping Vladimir Putin build a factory to mass produce lethal Iranian attack drones to pummel Ukraine.
Last year Britain, France, Germany, the U.S. and Ukraine said Iran's supplying its attack drones to Russia violates a 2015 U.N. Security Council resolution enshrining the Iran nuclear deal. They wanted U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to send officials to Kyiv to investigate, but the U.N. declined.
But according to satellite imagery, and U.S. intelligence sources, Iran has since given Russia the ability to build thousands of Iranian-designed Shahed 136 attack drones itself in a massive secret military base in Tatarstan, some 500 miles east of Moscow. (RELATED: Just Like Obama, Biden's Huge Iran Hostage Payoff Will Fund Terrorism)
The Washington Post (WP), based partly on leaked Russian documents, reported that Russia hopes to produce upwards of 6,000 of the upgraded Iranian kamikaze drones, which have a thousand-mile range, by 2025. Iran doesn't have the manufacturing capability to mass produce these weapons at the scale Russia needs.
In November, WP reported:
Russian and Iranian officials had finalized a deal in which the self-detonating drones would be produced at the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, a government-backed manufacturing hub designed to attract foreign investment. The cooperation included the transfer of designs, training of production staff and provision of increasingly hard-to-source electronic components.
Under the deal between the two rogue regimes, the new documents show, Tehran is effectively selling Russia a franchise “with Iranian specialists sharing project documentation, locally produced or reverse-engineered components and know-how.”
Now the WP notes:
The [new] documents show that the facility's engineers are trying to improve on Iran's dated manufacturing techniques, using Russian industrial expertise to produce the drones on a larger scale than Tehran has achieved and with greater quality control. The engineers also are exploring improvements to the drone itself, including making it capable of swarm attacks in which the UAVs autonomously coordinate a strike on a target.
The paper adds that the new facility is larger than 14 football fields and set to be expanded. Production of the drones is reportedly to be separated into three stages:
The first envisioned Iran's delivery of disassembled drones that would be reassembled at the facility. The second called for the facility to produce airframes — the hollow bodies of the drones — that would be combined with Iranian-supplied engines and electronics. In the final and most ambitious stage, more than 4,000 drones would be produced with little Iranian assistance and delivered to the Russian military by September 2025.
In the past three months, Russia has bombarded Ukraine with more than 600 of Shahed-136 drones. (RELATED: Russia Conducting Drone Strikes 200 Meters From NATO Country)
However, if things go according to Russian plans, and although production is reportedly behind schedule, Russia could eventually launch hundreds of “Shahed” drones at Ukrainian targets at a time, rather than the dozens currently used.
Russia calls the Iranian drone the Geran-2. It can carry a 118-pound warhead toward a preprogrammed target. Because the drone is powered by a noisy propeller engine, Ukrainians have dubbed it “the flying moped.”
Some experts doubt Russia's ability to make 6,000 drones but believe it will be producing a lot more than Iran alone can make.
David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who helped lead the research team that studied the documents, said: “Alabuga looks to be seeking a drone developmental capability that exceeds Iran's.”
Based on this new evidence, the U.N. should be pressured to act against Iran. And Biden should stop helping the Iranian regime.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Don’t suppose the author has a financial relationship with the military/industrial complex.