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As the war in Ukraine continues, some officials have convinced that Iran and Russia are building a new alliance of convenience.
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By David E. Sanger, Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt
WASHINGTON — Biden’s management has embarked on a major effort to stop Iran’s ability to produce and deliver drones to Russia for use in the war in Ukraine, a venture that echoes its years-long program to cut off Tehran’s access to nuclear technology.
In talks in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, a number of intelligence, military and national security officials described an expanding U. S. program aimed at stifling Iran’s ability to make drones, getting the Russians to release the unmanned “kamikaze. “”All else fails, provide the Ukrainians with the necessary defenses to shoot them down from the sky.
The scale of the effort has become clearer in recent weeks. Management accelerated its moves to deprive Iran of the Western-made parts needed to manufacture the drones sold to Russia after it became clear, upon examining the remains of the intercepted drones, that they are filled with American-made technology.
U. S. forces The U. S. military is helping the Ukrainian military target sites where drones are ready to be released, a difficult task as the Russians move liberation sites from football fields to parking lots. , to Ukraine’s chances of shooting them down, with everything from gunfire to missiles.
But all 3 approaches have faced profound challenges, and the push to eliminate critical parts for drones is already proving as complicated as the decades-long crusade to deprive Iran of the factors needed to build the sensitive centrifuges it uses to enrich quasi-centrifuges-grade uranium. The Iranians, U. S. intelligence officials have said in recent weeks, are applying their expertise to the drone program on how to spread the manufacture of nuclear centrifuges in the country and locate “dual-use” technologies on the black market to circumvent export controls.
In fact, one of the Iranian corporations designated across Britain, France and Germany as one of the leading brands of one of the two types of drones purchased through the Russians, Quds Aviation, has been on the United Nations lists of Iran’s suppliers for nuclear and nuclear energy. missile systems for years. The company, which is owned by Iran’s military, has expanded its diversity of drones despite waves of sanctions.
The administration’s stampede to deal with Iranian-supplied drones comes at a significant point in the war, just as Ukraine has its own drones to deeply attack Russia, adding an attack this week on a base of some of the country’s strategic bombers. It comes as officials in Washington and London warn that Iran could be about to supply missiles to Russia, which would help ease Moscow’s severe shortage.
Western alliance officials say they are convinced that Iran and Russia, whether they are isolated by U. S. sanctions, will not be able to do so. In the U. S. , they are building a new alliance of convenience. Putin. “
The Biden administration, having abandoned hopes of reviving the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran, adds new sanctions every few weeks.
In an effort to prevent drone strikes, Mr. Biden is also committing a best friend to a long history of undermining Iran’s nuclear program: Israel.
In a secure video meeting last Thursday with Israel’s most sensible intelligence, military and national security officials, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, “discussed the development of Iran’s military’s relations with Russia, adding that the Kremlin’s arms movement opposes Ukraine, targeting its civilian infrastructure and Russia’s source of army generation to Iran in return. “the White House said in a statement describing the assembly. The statement did not provide the main points on how the two countries made a decision on the issue.
But the fact that management decided to highlight the discussion, at a quarterly assembly usually aimed at disrupting Iran’s nuclear capabilities, was remarkable. Israel and the United States have a long history of joint operations to confront technological threats emanating from Tehran. Together, they developed one of the world’s most well-known and complicated cyberattacks, computer code later called “Stuxnet,” to attack Iran’s nuclear centrifuge facilities.
Since then, Israel has not kept its sabotage of nuclear enrichment centers a secret.
In a statement, Adrienne Watson, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, declared the scale of the radical crusade of Iran’s drone program.
“We are looking for tactics to target Iranian drones through sanctions, export controls and discussions with personal corporations whose parts have been used in production,” he said, the acronym for “unmanned aerial vehicles. “
He added: “We are evaluating additional steps we can take in terms of export controls to limit Iran’s generation to that used in drones. “
Iran’s interest in drones dates back more than 3 decades, when the country was looking for tactics to monitor and harass ships in the Persian Gulf. The Mohajer I, the predecessor of one of the drones recently sold to the Russians, made its first flight in 1986.
Progress has been slow, but it would likely have been helped in 2011 when the Central Intelligence Agency seized a stealthy, unarmed RQ-170 from the Pentagon fleet in Afghanistan and flew over Iran, in what appeared to be an effort to map some of the piles of tunnels dug by the Iranians to hide elements of their nuclear program.
A malfunction led the aircraft to land in the desert, and President Obama briefly thought about sending a Navy SEAL team to fly it before it fell into the hands of Iranian engineers, senior officials later reported. He took no chances, and within days, the Iranians paraded the drone through the streets of Tehran, a propaganda victory.
But U. S. intelligence officials are not yet in charge of the U. S. U. S. officials later concluded that the aircraft likely turned out to be a boon to Iranian drone designers, who could be the ship’s opposing engineers.
It wasn’t until 2016 that Iran announced it would begin expanding attack drones, some in cooperation with Russia. Many of the former were put into the hands of Iranian-backed militias, adding Houthi rebels in Yemen, and were better used. in 2019 in attacks on two Saudi oil processing facilities through Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company.
U. S. officials said reports in Saudi Arabia and attacks on U. S. forces in Syria gave them insight into the functions of Iranian drones and the challenge of dealing with suicide attacks in which a small explosive is placed in the drone’s nose. But the fallout from the invasion of Ukraine underscored that Iran knew how to mass-produce the plane, a specific fear at a time when the opening of an Iranian factory in Russia is being communicated.
Iran’s program has hardly been without its challenges. So far, deliveries have come sporadically, with Russia and Iran upgrading drones to work in the bloodless Ukrainian winter. And Iran has run into supply chain challenges, a challenge the United States must exacerbate.
However, despite years of sanctions against Iran’s defense sector, Iranian drones are still largely built with American and Western parts. a crackdown, adding appeals to the corporations whose products had been discovered. Almost all had the same reaction: they are unrestricted “dual-use” parts whose flow is about to stop.
Biden’s management is anyway.
In September, management tightened sanctions, in particular naming the companies involved in building the plane for Russia. This followed new moves in November against companies such as Safiran Airport Services, a Tehran-based company it accuses of sending the drones on behalf of the Russian government.
In November, the Treasury Department sanctioned two corporations founded in the United Arab Emirates, a key U. S. ally, accusing them of involvement with Safiran.
Michael Kofman, director of Russian studies at NAC, a think tank in Arlington, Virginia, said the sanctions were an instant fix.
“Export controls are going to have an effect, you have to be realistic about the timelines in which they will operate,” Kofman said.
“The sanctions are in place and make it expensive to obtain components,” he said. “But we decided that countries will get their hands on the generation for narrow defense applications, or adjust their weapon designs to what they can get, even if it’s less reliable. “
As the war continues, the United States, Britain, France and Germany are pressuring UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to open a formal investigation into Russia, and Iran is jointly violating the terms of a UN restriction on the export of complicated weapons from Iran.
Guterres has made clear that his most sensible priority is to reach an agreement with Russia on Ukrainian grain exports, to alleviate the shortage, and aides say now is not the time to threaten that agreement with an investigation whose end is predictable.
Iran appears to be sending drones to Russian forces on cargo planes, on routes that leave little opportunity to intercept them. This means seeking to attack them on the ground, which is not an easy task.
Until just over a month ago, according to U. S. government officials. In the U. S. and Britain, drones were largely founded in Crimea. They then disappeared for several days and reappeared in Russian-occupied spaces in Zaporizhzhia province. The moves were followed by the U. S. The U. S. and Ukraine are in the U. S. andofficers, some sitting side by side in Army intelligence centers. But drones are very mobile, with release systems fixed on trucks, and the Russians know they are being pursued, so they are moving them to safer places, making it difficult to track and hit them.
“The launch update is likely due to Russian concerns about Crimea’s vulnerability, while it is also convenient for resupply from the point of likely arrival of weapons to Russia, in Astrakhan,” a British military assessment said earlier this month.
It is transparent that army quotes can be a two-way street. Britain has accused Russia of making plans to give Iran complex pieces of the military in exchange for a pile of drones.
“Iran has one of the main sponsors of Russia’s military,” British Defense Minister Ben Wallace told parliament last week.
“In exchange for offering more than three hundred suicide drones, Russia now intends to supply Iran with complex military components, which compromises security in the Middle East and abroad; we will have to disclose this agreement,” Wallace said.
Several U. S. corporations, in addition to Edgesource Corporation and BlueHalo, both founded in Virginia, have provided education or generation to stumble and defeat Russian drones, U. S. officials said.
Edgesource has donated about $2 million worth of systems, adding one called Windtalkers, for Ukraine to locate, identify and track incoming hostile drones more than 20 miles away, while at the same time identifying Ukraine’s own drones in the same airspace, said Joseph Urbaniak, the company’s director. Lead Operations Officer.
The United States has provided Ukraine with another generation to counter drones, most recently as part of a $275 million delivery of weapons and equipment announced by the Pentagon on Dec. 9. . .
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