An offshoot of the Department of Defense has declassified and set up a display of Iranian drones used by Russia in Ukraine to convince global leaders to hold Tehran accountable.
The Defense Intelligence Agency, a combat support agency of the Pentagon, started the exhibition at the beginning of the month, and representatives from more than a dozen countries have already come to see it, a senior analyst told a group of reporters on Wednesday.
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The display includes a nearly fully intact Shahed-131 one-way unmanned aerial vehicle recovered in July 2021 in Karbala, Iraq, that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps acknowledged was its own. It also includes the wreckage of four Shahed-131s that were found in Ukraine last fall that the DIA was able to piece together, and the exhibit is designed to prove Iran's drones are being used by Russia in Ukraine despite Tehran's repeated denials.
In particular, the analyst took off the navigation antenna from the drone found in Ukraine and placed it on the same location on the drone found in Iraq. It appeared to be a perfect fit. Both had the same honeycomb interior, in addition to having identical wing stabilizers, the analyst noted, also displaying seemingly identical engines on each.
Members of Congress and staffers are expected to visit the exhibit starting in September, while U.S. allies, neutral observers, and adversaries are able to see the exhibit upon request.
"One of our core functions is to provide information to policymakers to enable informed decision-making and governance," Lt. Col. Robert Carter, DIA spokesman, told the Washington Examiner. "Second to that, we have a responsibility to counter disinformation in the public information dimension. This is an enabling tool for policymakers."
The agency has set up this exhibit in the DIA building's museum partially in an attempt to convince global leaders at the United Nations to investigate the matter as a violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, which prohibits all countries, including permanent members of the Security Council, from transferring weapons from Iran without advance approval from the Security Council.
"The United Nations must respond to growing calls from the international community to investigate these violations," Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said to the U.N. Security Council in June. "Look, Resolution 2231 does give the Secretary-General a mandate to carry out these investigations, and we have all encouraged the U.N. to move forward on carrying out these investigations immediately."
The United States, United Kingdom, Ukraine, and France have pushed the U.N. to investigate Iran's decision to provide Russia with drones, though Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has resisted those calls.
A U.N. investigation "would mean we have accomplished our task at hand," Carter added. "To present credible information to our partners, allies, and the international community and to have them act on that information."
The Iranian Shahed drones are impressive with their simplicity, the analyst explained, noting that many components within them are commercially available. The U.S. government has attempted to warn commercial companies about the possibility their products are being used in such vehicles.
“Russia and Iran have entered into a full-scale defense partnership that is directly enabling Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine. Russia is using Iranian UAVs to attack Ukrainian population centers and kill Ukrainian civilians," National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson told the Washington Examiner. "Throughout the past year and a half, we have used the tools at our disposal to expose and disrupt these activities, including by establishing extensive export restrictions on technology that Russia can use for its war machine and by imposing sanctions on those involved in the transfer of Iranian military equipment to Russia for use in Ukraine."
These drones, the Shahed-131 and the slightly larger Shahed-136, which Russia has more frequently used in Ukraine, have limited usage, given they are one-way attack drones that are cheap to produce.
"The Departments of Commerce, Justice, State, and Treasury also recently released a business advisory to alert companies about the risks of providing materials to Iran and to instruct companies how they can prevent their products from being acquired by Iran for its UAV program," Watson added. "As Russia searches for ways to evade our actions, the U.S. government, alongside allies and partners, will continue to ramp up our own efforts to counter such evasion.”
Russia is constructing a production plant to build its own version of the Shaheds in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, and the NSC said in June it could be "fully operational early next year."
The U.K.’s defense ministry said last week in an update on the war in Ukraine that Russian forces have “almost certainly started to deploy domestically produced one-way attack Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (OWA-UAVs) based on Iranian Shahed designs.”
Conflict Armament Research, a U.K.-based organization that investigates weapons components, released a report days earlier in which it concluded the same thing. CAR was able to come to that conclusion after investigating the remnants of two Geran-2 single-use drones last month due to “major differences in the airframe construction and in the internal units, including for navigation.”
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Neither the NSC, the Pentagon, nor the DIA analyst would confirm that Russia had begun producing drones domestically, though the official noted they would use the same indicators CAR used to make such a determination.
"As of May, Russia received hundreds of one-way attack UAVs, as well as UAV production-related equipment, from Iran," Lt. Col. Garron Garn, a Pentagon spokesman, said in response to whether they had seen Russia start drone production. "Russia has used Iranian UAVs to strike Kyiv and terrorize the Ukrainian population, and the Russia-Iran military partnership appears to be deepening. We noted previously that Russia was working with Iran to produce Iranian UAVs from inside Russia. We have information that Russia is receiving materials from Iran needed to build a UAV manufacturing plant inside Russia."
The analyst explained that even if Russia has begun making its own versions of the Shaheds, they aren't up to fully operational capacity — and said the NSC's previous timeline remains the working expectation.