November 24, 2025

Sanctions Aren’t Enough to Shut Down the Moscow-Tehran Black Market for War

By: Delaney Soliday

This article was originally published on The Hill.

On Oct. 5, 2025, Russia launched a wave of 549 drones and missiles at Lviv, just 35 miles from Ukraine’s border with Poland, that killed five people and left tens of thousands without electricity. While those weapons were most likely produced in an arms factory 500 miles east of Moscow, they were built using Iranian blueprints, Russian material and Western technology.

Moscow largely has Tehran to thank for the cheap, long-range, deadly Shahed drone technology that allows it to dominate the skies over Ukraine. An initial $1.75 billion deal inked in 2023 permitted Russia to directly import thousands of Iranian Shahed uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) while developing the indigenous capabilities to produce them directly on Russian soil. In less than three years, Moscow’s defense-industrial base succeeded not only in surpassing its targets for domestic production, but in engineering Russian jet-powered variants of the Shahed-238 custom-made for kamikaze attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure.

The geographic scope and extent of Iranian-Russian cooperation highlights the failure of traditional sanctions to prevent Moscow and Tehran from seeking key components like chips and microcomputers from third-party countries.

However, despite Russia’s success in domesticating up to 90 percent of the UAV manufacturing and assembly process at its facility in Alabuga, it must import a few key parts it can’t produce itself, like advanced sensors and microcomputers for flight control systems.

According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the October 5 barrage contained more than 100,000 “foreign-made parts,” including some produced by American companies (like sensors and converters for Shahed UAVs) and NATO allies. A recent investigation discovered that more than 200,000 illicit shipments of microelectronics entered Russia between 2022 and the beginning of 2024 — most consisting of microprocessors manufactured by American companies like Texas Instruments and Analog Devices.

Read the full article on The Hill.

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