After weeks of denials, the Iranian regime admitted delivering military drones to Russia on Saturday.
Tehran supplied Russia with a “small number of drones months before the Ukraine war,” Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, confessed.
The admission comes as the Russian military deploys hundreds of Iranian-made suicide drones to hit military targets, residential apartments, and power grids in the capital Kyiv and cities across Ukraine.
The UK newspaper The Guardian reported the Iranian confession:
Iran has acknowledged for the first time that it supplied Moscow with drones but said they were sent before the war in Ukraine, where Russia has used drones to target power stations and civilian infrastructure.The Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, said a “small number” of drones were supplied to Russia a few months before Moscow’s forces invaded Ukraine on 24 February. He denied Tehran that was continuing to supply drones to Moscow.“This fuss made by some western countries that Iran has provided missiles and drones to Russia to help the war in Ukraine – the missile part is completely wrong,” the official IRNA news agency quoted him as saying. “The drone part is true and we provided Russia a small number of drones months before the Ukraine war.”
Iran was forced to admit the drone delivery amid reports that the Shia-Islamic regime has supplied Russia with 1,000 Shahed-136 “kamikaze” drones. Tehran is expected to deliver a total of 2,400 attack drones as part of a weapons deal agreed upon with the Kremlin, media reports say.
Members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, were in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine to train Russian troops to operate the drones. “British and US intelligence says the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is on the ground in Crimea, supporting Russian drone attacks on Ukraine,” the British TV channel Sky News reported last month.
Several Iranian military operatives were reportedly killed in a recent Ukrainian air strike. “Ukrainian strikes in the past week against Russia’s ongoing invasion killed at least 10 Iranians,” The Times of Israel reported on October 21, citing Ukrainian officials.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy slammed Iran for lying about the drone deliveries and training Russians to operate them. The Ukrainian leader warned the Iranian regime of “the consequences of complicity” for their “terrorist co-operation” with Russia.
The British TV channel Sky News reported Zelenskyy’s sharp remarks:
(…) Zelenskyy claims the Iranians are not being honest about the amount they’re supplying.He said: “By the way today there were messages from Iran, from official representatives where they did admit that they did supply drones for Russian terror.”But even in this confession they lied.”We shoot down at least 10 Iranian drones every day and the Iranian regime claims that it allegedly gave little. And even before the start of the full-scale invasion.”Only during one day yesterday 11 Shahed-136 drones were destroyed.We know for sure that Iranian instructors taught Russian terrorists how to use drones, and Tehran is generally silent about it.”
Having supplied Moscow with attack drones, the Iranian regime wants Russian assistance in advancing its rogue nuclear program.
“Iran is seeking Russia’s help to bolster its nuclear program, US intelligence officials believe, as Tehran looks for a backup plan should a lasting nuclear deal with world powers fail to materialize,” CNN reported Saturday.
“The intelligence suggests that Iran has been asking Russia for help acquiring additional nuclear materials and with nuclear fuel fabrication, sources briefed on the matter said. The fuel could help Iran power its nuclear reactors and could potentially further shorten Iran’s so-called ‘breakout time’ to create a nuclear weapon,” the broadcaster added.
After President Joe Biden replaced the Trump administration’s “Maximum Pressure” policy with his appeasement policy, the Islamic Republic has managed to enrich enough weapons-grade uranium to build a nuclear bomb, the UN nuclear watchdog IAEA disclosed in September.
Under President Biden’s watch, Moscow and Tehran have ramped up their military cooperation, with Russia using Iran as a safe haven to bypass Western sanctions.
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