‘All It Takes is One’: Iran Gives Russia Help From the Air

The Iranian-made drones that Russia has sent in swarms high over Ukraine’s battlefields are not particularly fast, running on an unsophisticated two-stroke engine akin to a lawnmower. They’re not going to sneak up on anyone, either: Russian troops have nicknamed them “mopeds” because of the buzzing noise the motor makes. And at about $20,000 apiece, you might find more high-tech gadgets in a pre-owned vehicle at a used car lot.

But the Shahed-136 loitering munition, which carries an 80-plus-pound warhead and is launched from the back of a truck, doesn’t need to be goosed up with the snazziest technology in modern warfare to pack a punch. The drones featured heavily in Russia’s cross-country air and missile salvo against Ukraine on Monday, though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said 13 of 24 of those launched by Russian forces this week were shot down.

That’s baked into the concept of cheap drone warfare. It’s a little bit like Iran’s approach to maritime warfare: Swarm any enemy with low-grade weapons, and hope one gets through.

“The whole point of using those Shaheds is that they fly in large groups and they can overwhelm air defenses,” said Samuel Bendett, an advisor at the CNA think tank. “All it takes is one or two of them to sneak past.”

Cheap drones have revolutionized recent warfare. The Israeli-made IAI Harop first made a splash during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, boasting the ability to be updated with a datalink during flight and loitering over the battlefield for hours before plunging onto unsuspecting targets with assistance against possible jammers. While the propeller-driven Shahed isn’t nearly as sophisticated, Russia has already found success in striking stationary Ukrainian military targets with the Iranian loitering munitions, some of which are carrying basic smartphone components and other U.S. and European computer chips on board.

The New York Times reported last month that Shaheds were used against U.S.-made artillery delivered to Ukraine, and Russia has also targeted Ukrainian troop positions and vehicles. And that’s just the first wave, officials are indicating in Kyiv. Zelensky said this week that Russia has ordered 2,400 more Shaheds.

The scale of the problem is also being made clear by Ukrainian weapons requests to the United States and other NATO members. In a letter sent to U.S. congressional leadership on Monday and seen by Foreign Policy, Ukraine’s top parliamentarian, Ruslan Stefanchuk, urged Congress to help expedite the delivery of a land-based Phalanx Weapon System, which is used to defend against rockets, artillery, and mortars, and could also take out small drones employed by the Russian military. Russian forces have mainly used the Shaheds to try to complement firepower coming from aviation and tube and rocket artillery.

The Shaheds also create a targeting problem for the Ukrainians. Though radar-guided guns can be effective against the loitering munitions, the Ukrainians only have those weapons in limited numbers, said Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a London-based think tank. And being small targets, they’re not necessarily easy to hit with U.S.-provided Javelins or shoulder-fired weapons and don’t carry enough of a heat signature to be hit with most man-portable weapons.

“It puts Ukrainians a bit more on the defensive, because now their logistics, their supply lines, their communications, their warehouses, their infrastructure could now be hit,” said Bendett, the CNA expert. Speaking at the latest Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pledged to provide Ukraine with air defenses as fast as possible. And Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Ukraine’s allies should “chip in” to help it build a layered air defense system.

But in the meantime, the off-the-shelf Iranian drones have still forced Ukraine’s military, which has been pummeled by the loitering munitions in the country’s southern cities of Mykolaiv and Odesa, to come up with counter-drone tactics on the fly. And as Russia has turned its guns on Ukraine’s civilian population in a campaign of terror, Ukrainian officials and experts fear the Shaheds will be increasingly used against civilian targets.

“They mostly use it to complement their campaign of terror,” said Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies in Kyiv.

But Bielieskov added that Ukrainian forces are already starting to adapt. “If you strike some headquarters, then people just move underground,” he said. “I don’t think that even against fixed targets, it would change anything. Forty kilograms is not that powerful of a warhead to destroy hardened targets or underground targets.”

And the $20,000 price tag disguises some hidden costs that the Shahed puts on the Russian military, experts said. The loitering munitions have to be imported from Tehran and then shipped out to the Russian military in Ukraine. Iran struggles to acquire camera components suitable for the drone because of the long-term U.S. and European sanctions against Tehran, so if the Russians want to trick out the Iranian-made drones with infrared seekers or better GPS guidance, it will cost them.

“These things may be relatively cheap in terms of the cost per munition, but just like any other munition, they require a logistics chain to support them,” said Bronk, the RUSI expert. “That’s one of the areas where Russia has been struggling, in the continued supply of really large quantities of ammunition, particularly artillery and longer-range missiles, to the front lines.”