What Do Iranian Drones Among Russian Forces Tell Us?
Did Russia Expose An Iranian Industrial Weakness?
A new fault line among the mullahs atop the hierarchy of Iran’s Islamic Republic over supplying/selling drones to Russia for use in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine offers some interesting perspectives on the state of Russia’s defense industry, Iran’s drone program, and the real-world capabilities of both.
Prominent cleric Masih Mohajeri, has published an article in the Iranian media taking a decided stance against the sale/transfer of Iranian drones to the Russian military.
In remarks picked up by other Iranian newspapers, Masih Mohajeri, writing on the front page of the newspaper Jomhouri-e-Islami, highlighted three things the government should have done: advised the party that started the war, ie Russia, to observe international regulations that prohibit encroachment on the territory of other countries; told Russia at the outset of the war that it had no right to use the drones in Ukraine that Iran had provided; maintained stronger relations with the invaded country.
Addressing the Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, he added: “Why did you not announce to Russia after the start of the war in Ukraine that it has no right to use Iranian drones in the war in Ukraine? Furthermore, why have you not openly condemned Russia for starting the war and why have you not made a redoubled effort to mediate between the two sides to end this evil war?”
What make this break from the unified front the mullahs ruling Iran typically show particularly noteworthy are the recent discoveries of Austrian light-aircraft engines in Iranian-made drones shot down over Ukraine.
Iranian Drone With Austrian Engine
The chain of connected events begins late September, when Ukrainian air defenses shot down an Iranian Mohajer-6 drone over the Black Sea.

Late last month came the revelation that the Mohajer-6 drone was powered by an Austrian Rotax light aircraft engine.
The sale of this type of engine to Iran by Rotax violates existing sanctions on Iran prohibiting sale of “dual use” technologies.
An engine designed by the Austrian company Rotax was discovered installed in one of Russia's Iranian-made Mohajer-6 drones that went down over the Black Sea earlier this month. Rotax says it has launched an investigation into its engines powering Iranian drones. The delivery of such hardware to Iran violates European Union sanctions banning the export of items with both civilian and military purposes, such as vehicle parts. Identical sanctions are imposed by the European Union against Russia, as well.
Rotax immediately issued a denial that any such sale had been authorized to Iranian UAV manufacturers, and began investigating how their hardware wound up in Iranian military drones.
The next dot to connect is an ongoing wave of thefts worldwide of exactly this type of engine.
So many have been stolen just in the U.K. alone that Operation Opal - a national intelligence team focused on organized crime - was called in to investigate the matter, according to the British Microlight Aircraft Association (BMAA), which along with the Light Aircraft Association (LAA) is collating information about the thefts in the U.K. These facts certainly point to the possibility that Tehran has been getting at least some of its drone engines by having operatives systemically literally rip them out of aircraft in foreign countries.
If Tehran is behind the engine thefts, then they are using black market stolen hardware to fill out their supply chains for UAV production—not just stolen technology in the form of schematics and other intellectual property, but actual hardware. These engines are not being reverse engineered, but being pressed directly into service. This, of course, immediately begs the question: “What else is Tehran stealing to keep its military industrial complex alive?”
Why Steal Hardware Instead Of Reverse Engineering It?
The engine thefts as a means of completing drone production is immediately seen as an odd strategy, given that Iran has successfully copied other engine types for its other drone models.
BY 2021, the US was ready to proceed with sanctions on Iranian manufacturers of drone components. A 2022 article at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy notes that “the Ababil-3 is powered by a four-cylinder Mado MD550 engine, an inferior copy of the German Limbach L550e engine, using Chinese parts and assemblies.
The IRGC-affiliated Oje Parvaz Mado Nafar Co., based in Shokuhieh Industrial Town northwest of Qom, is currently the largest producer of drone piston engines in Iran. In October 2021, the US Treasury Department sanctioned the company and its directors for procuring engines and parts for Iran’s military and drone industry.”
Iran has had a long and relatively successful history of cloning weapons technology, having early last year test fired a clone of the American Sidewinder missile.
The exact nature of the Azarakhsh missile remains something of a mystery, but The War Zone looked into the background of the story in this previous article. Suffice to say, the weapon appears to be at least a derivative of the U.S.-made AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missile, thousands of which were delivered to Iran before the revolution that ousted the Shah in 1979.
Additionally, its Shahed 181 and 191 drones are believed to be reverse-engineered from an American drone model:
Apart from the already known Shahed-129, a Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) UAV that appears to be a hybrid of the Israeli Hermes 450 and the US MQ-1/9 Predator, what really stood out are the Shahed 181 and Shahed 191, developed from the RQ-170 captured by Iran in 2011. The American stealthy UAV, dubbed the “Beast of Kandahar” when it was first spotted in Afghanistan in 2007, was either hijacked via GPS spoofing, as claimed by Iran, or, most likely, crash landed because of an unknown failure and later found by the IRGC.
One possible motivation for Iran to sell Russia military drones was an opportunity to get samples of the latest US-made weapons systems, as Russia is believed to have paid for the drones with a combination of cash and captured hardware.
In exchange, the source said, Russia sent a British NLAW anti-tank missile, a US Javelin anti-tank missile and a Stinger anti-aircraft missile. Those weapons somehow "fell into Russian hands" on their way to Ukraine as military aid, the source told Sky.
An opportunity to reverse-engineer the latest NATO weapons systems would certainly explain why, as was speculated in assessing the apparent rift within the Iranian government over the drones sales, the military might not have informed the rest of the Iranian government of the transactions.
A former Iranian ambassador to Moscow, Nematollah Izadi, said it appeared there had been no proper cooperation between the military and diplomatic wings of the Iranian state, possibly leaving the foreign ministry in the dark. It seemed one section of the government thought it profitable to sell drones to Moscow for the use in the war or otherwise, Izadi said, and “we seem to have succumbed to a deception operation by Russia, which, in my opinion, does not serve our national interests at all”.
Still, the interest in cloning and reverse-engineering a variety of weapons systems from around the world leaves us with an odd question: With what is clearly a sophisticated ability to reverse engineer various subsystems and technologies for its own military designs, why would Iran outfit even one Mohajer-6 drone with stolen hardware rather than knockoff clone hardware?
Given the demands placed on military hardware by military usage, resorting to even slightly used parts—e.g., stolen Rotax engines—would weaken and diminish performance. Assuming Iran’s industrial capacity is up to the task, even an inferior copy of the Rotax engine, installed new and with no prior hours of flight time, should be preferable to used stolen engines with variable prior hours of flight time.
It’s not surprising that Iran would steal Rotax light aircraft engines. It is surprising that Iran might be stealing them in order to use them, rather than copy them.
Iran’s Military Industrial Complex Is Limited. So Is Russia’s.
What we are forced to consider from the use of presumably stolen Rotax engines in serial production of Iranian drones is that, while Iran’s ability to reverse engineer products might be sophisticated, the country’s ability to then produce at scale may be rather limited. Whether because of sanctions, corruption, or other unknown limitations, Iran may be constrained in its ability to churn out weapons of war.
This might explain why some in the Iranian government are not happy about the drone sales: Russia’s use of Iranian drones may have inadvertently exposed significant vulnerabilities and weaknesses within Iran’s weapons industries. Iran, while willing and able to send drones to irregular groups such as the Houthi rebels in Yemen, as well as Hezbollah and Hamas, may not have the industrial capacity to participate in a conventional struggle such as is taking place in Ukraine.
This would have profound implications for the regional balance of power within the Persian Gulf region, where Iran has long used support for terrorist and insurgent groups to wield influence, seeking to become regional hegemon.
As Russia has been demonstrating quite plainly of late, without an healthy economy to support forces in the field, a country’s capacity for military power projection becomes limited to non-existent.
Russia’s recent withdrawal from Kherson in Ukraine is in no small measure due to its inability to produce, let alone transport, the war materials necessary for sustaining occupation of the city. Should Russia ultimately be ejected from Ukrainian territory, a primary cause will be Russia’s inability to supply the front line forces sufficiently.
Similarly, Iran’s ability to dominate its spheres of influence will naturally be constrained by the limitations of its own native industries. What the world is learning about Iranian drones in Ukraine may be revealing what some of those limitations are.