It shows Tehran’s growing participation in this sector and certain shortcomings of the Russian drone industry: lack of technology and ballistic arsenal
The Russian use of Iranian drones in Ukraine demonstrates two things: Tehran’s growing involvement in this sector and certain shortcomings of the Russian drone industry: lack of technology and ballistic arsenal. In recent weeks, the Iranian-made ‘Shaded 136’ drones have become key players in the war in Ukraine, where the Russian military has used them, renamed ‘Geran 2’, in numerous attacks. On Monday, 17 drones with these characteristics took part in the attack on the heart of Kiev and other key cities in the conflict. The ‘Shaded 136’ (‘witness of the faith’ in Persian) is an unmanned remote-controlled aircraft, which entered service in 2021. With an action capacity of 2,500 kilometers, they are used exclusively for selective attacks and the explosives they can carry. explode on impact.
The ‘Shaded 136’ can reach a speed of 180 kilometers per hour and carry out attacks on radar, artillery pieces and other military targets. The explosive is carried in the nose, where they also carry the optic for the direction. Its size is 3.5 meters long, 2.5 meters wingspan and weighs about 200 kilograms. “The Shahed 136 is a fairly large and inexpensive suicide drone to make. It hits its target by GPS coordinates entered for takeoff. Then it moves forward autonomously, flying quite low and reaching a target set up hundreds of kilometers away,” Pierre Grasser, a French researcher associated with the Sirice Center in Paris, told the AFP agency.
Last July, the US government warned that Iran was preparing to supply hundreds of drones to Russia for use by Moscow in its military offensive against Ukraine. A month later, another US intelligence report reported that Russian cargo planes had quietly begun picking up the first shipment of Iranian drones for use on the front lines. The report stated that the plane left Iran on August 19 with at least two types of unmanned aerial vehicles.
The first verified use of the El ‘Shaded 136’ against Ukrainian targets occurred on September 13, when one of them was shot down in the Kharkiv region, near Kuyansk, where Russian forces then tried to stem the counter-offensive launched by Ukraine. .
Since then, the recorded number of Russian attacks by these kamikaze drones has grown rapidly, both on the front lines, where they have been launched against military weapons and artillery positions, and in areas further from the front line, such as Ukraine’s regions of Odessa, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk.
It is believed that the El ‘Shaded 136’ had already been used in the conflict in Yemen and Iraqi Kurdistan before the invasion of Ukraine. In July 2021, Israel accused Iran of an attack with this device, off the coast of Oman, on the tanker ‘Mercer Street’, owned by Japanese but operated by a company owned by Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer. Tehran denied involvement in the attack, which was carried out with a drone and killed two crew members, a Romanian and a British civilian.
Source: La Verdad
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