Russia sends US-supplied weapons captured in Ukraine to Iran

Russia is capturing some US-made weapons and military equipment which Ukraine received from the US and NATO, and is sending them to Iran. The US believes Teheran will try to make their own copies of these systems.

Source: European Pravda with reference to CNN and four of its sources familiar with this issue

Over the past year, officials from the US, NATO and other Western countries have witnessed several instances of the Russian forces capturing small sized shoulder-fired weapons including Javelin anti-tank systems and Stinger anti-aircraft systems which Ukrainian troops have sometimes been forced to abandon on the battlefield.

In many cases, Russia has sent this military equipment to Iran for further dismantling and analysis, likely so that the Iranian troops could try and create their own replicas of these weapons. Russia believes that supplying Iran with Western weapons will stimulate Teheran to continue supporting the Russian war against Ukraine.

US officials do not consider this problem to be large-scale or systematic, and the Ukrainian military has been informing the Pentagon about any losses of US equipment to the Russian forces since the beginning of the war.

Nevertheless, US officials admit that it is very hard to track such supplies.

It is not clear if Iran managed to successfully remake US armaments captured in Ukraine, but Teheran has turned out to be very skilled in developing weapon systems based on US military equipment captured in the past.

One of the key weapons in the Iranian arsenal is the Tufan anti-tank guided missile based on the US BGM-71 TOW missile first released in the 1970s. In 2011, Iranians also captured a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel drone and remade it in order to create their new drone, which entered Israeli airspace in 2018 before being shot down.

This coordination is another example of a burgeoning defence partnership between Moscow and Teheran, which has grown stronger over the past year since Russia became more desperate for external military aid in its war against Ukraine. John Kirby, Coordinator for Strategic Communications at the National Security Council in the White House, stated last month that this partnership would not only destabilise Ukraine but can also pose a threat for Iran’s neighbouring states in the Middle East.

The US has not found any proof that the weapons it has sent to Ukraine have ended up outside its borders. 

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