Pre-War Industrial Resilience

Long before Operation Epic Fury, I had been thinking and writing carefully about Iran’s missile program and its underlying logic. In the aftermath of the 12-Day War, there was a real temptation to treat that conflict as having resolved the question of Iranian missile capability. I pushed back on that read.

In December 2025, I wrote that Iran’s post-12-Day War rebuilding effort reflected something more than simple reconstitution. The piece argued that Iran’s approach represented “a broader shift from purely retaliatory deterrence toward genuine pre-emptive warfighting potential.” The distinction matters because it changed what Iran was optimizing for. A purely retaliatory force is sized and structured differently from one intended to sustain pressure across a prolonged conflict. The post-war investment patterns, the acceleration of solid-fuel production, the emphasis on geographic dispersal, all of these pointed toward a force being rebuilt with a different operational concept in mind.

The industrial resilience question was one I flagged early and one I think turned out to be among the more important calls. The June 2025 war imposed genuine costs on Iran’s production infrastructure and operational basing. Israeli strikes hit dozens of sites across the missile network. But the overall system did not break, and I wrote at the time that Iran had demonstrated “an ability to begin meaningful restoration within weeks and achieve partial operational capability within months.” That was not a widely shared view in late 2025. There was considerable confidence in some quarters that the degradation would be lasting. The satellite imagery that followed, and the alarm that Israeli intelligence was expressing by December, suggested the more cautious read was correct.

I also tried to be disciplined about what the actual production constraint was rather than just accepting the figures circulating in the analytical community. Following Carl Parkin’s open-source work on solid rocket motor production at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, I wrote that the casting infrastructure at facilities like Khojir, Parchin, and Shahroud gave you a hard ceiling on monthly output. If you could count the casting pits, you could bound production capacity. That framing helped me avoid treating missile inventory figures as fixed and knowable when the underlying data simply did not support that confidence.

The Numbers Problem

This is the area where I want to be most transparent, because I think a lot of public analysis, including some of my own, was on shakier ground than we acknowledged.

I tried throughout this period to avoid publishing raw inventory figures. The honest reason is that a large portion of the pre-war assessments on launcher counts and stockpile totals reflected what the analytical community believed Iran had, not what anyone could verify with real confidence. In the words of another analyst, it was “vibes-based.” The estimates that circulated widely were in many cases extrapolations built on older data, adjusted by inference rather than direct observation.

The SRBM-to-MRBM framing was the clearest example of this. We had better grounds for relative assessments of the composition of Iran’s missile force than we did for the total size of it. Knowing that short-range systems significantly outnumbered medium-range ones shaped the analysis of what target sets were actually in play and which systems Iran would be most likely to expend early versus hold in reserve. That relative framing held up better than the absolute figures.

What I (and everyone outside of various governments) genuinely did not have a firm handle on was the full scope of Iran’s UAV inventory and the organizational division of labor within the IRGC Aerospace Force between drone and ballistic missile operations. I said as much in private conversations and occasionally in public. In my wartime piece written ten days into the conflict, I was explicit that there were “many claims, about damage, targeting, and operational outcomes, that I remain hesitant to treat as definitive.” I stand by that caution even when it frustrated readers who wanted cleaner answers.

Judging What Iran Actually Did

From the outside, Iran’s early strikes, particularly in the Gulf, were more operationally coherent than Western commentary tended to credit. That assessment needs to be stated carefully. Iranian precision was not comparable to U.S. or Israeli standards. Iranian command and control faced real stress under sustained targeting pressure. The volume of missile salvos declined over the course of the conflict in ways that raised genuine questions about launcher attrition and inventory depth. None of that is in dispute.

I made this case in my Carnegie Diwan interview at the time:

“Iran’s military strategy was never built to perform like the United States or Israel in high-tempo precision warfare. It is structured around endurance, retaliation, and the ability to impose costs over time through missiles, drones, and regional escalation. That does not make it particularly impressive from a Western operational standpoint, but it does mean performance should be judged against the strategy Iran actually built — not the one analysts wish it had.”

That framing attracted some pushback, but I think it’s the only intellectually honest way to assess any military’s performance. Judging Iran’s missile campaign by whether it achieved U.S.-style precision effects is like judging a boxer for not winning on points when he was always fighting for a knockdown. A more useful question is whether it accomplished what Iran designed it to accomplish, which was sustaining a credible retaliatory posture, imposing meaningful costs on adversaries and the regional economy, and keeping the conflict politically painful at an acceptable cost to Iran.

On those narrower metrics, the campaign delivered more than initial Western assessments suggested. In another post, I wrote that Iran had “succeeded in demonstrating that it can still disrupt Gulf trade and energy flows.” Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz declined sharply, and international commercial traffic largely withdrew from the waterway. These were real effects, even if the material damage from individual strikes was often limited.

I also flagged a tension that I think is worth tracking carefully going forward. Iran’s strikes against Gulf states carried political risks that its traditional deterrence model did not fully account for. The threat to global energy supply has historically been a source of Iranian leverage because it made third parties reluctant to see the conflict escalate. Striking the UAE and Saudi Arabia directly, in the volume Iran did, invited those states to reconsider their relationship with Iran in ways that may complicate Tehran’s regional position long after the shooting stops. I wrote that Iran may have been “weakening the very regional environment that previously helped sustain its model of deterrence.” That dynamic is still unfolding and I don’t think it has resolved cleanly in either direction.

On Deterrence: Defending the Framing

I received sustained criticism for writing that Iranian deterrence failed. I want to engage that criticism directly because I think most of it rested on a conceptual imprecision that is worth correcting, and because I think the framing my co-author and I used was right.

Deterrence means preventing an attack from occurring. Iran did not prevent an attack. Operation Epic Fury happened. On that definition, Iranian deterrence failed, and I don’t think that conclusion is seriously contestable.

What critics were pointing to, often without fully articulating it, was a different phenomenon. Iran’s intra-war deterrence, its ability to maintain a credible and graduated retaliatory posture across the duration of the conflict, functioned considerably better than many expected. Missile launches continued after senior leadership was killed. The IRGC executed pre-authorized strike packages without waiting for real-time approval from a central command that no longer fully existed. The system kept generating strikes. That is not evidence that deterrence worked in the strategic sense. It is evidence that Iran had built a force designed to retaliate under exactly these conditions, and that the force did what it was designed to do.

The distinction between these two things is not pedantic. It has direct implications for how we assess Iranian military investment, for how we model Iranian behavior in future crises, and for what conclusions we draw about the utility of the missile program as a strategic instrument. Collapsing the two definitions together produces bad analysis.

This also connects to the escalation ladder framework associated with Robert Pape’s Claude Agent. Iran was not trying to win a military victory. It was trying to demonstrate that the costs of attacking it were real, to preserve regime coherence under pressure, and to emerge from the conflict with enough residual capability to deter a follow-on campaign. Whether it succeeded on all of those dimensions is a separate question. But the logic was consistent, and the execution was more coherent than it was given credit for in real time.

What I Got Wrong

The honest answer is that my pre-war writing underestimated Iran’s regenerative capacity at the base and launcher level, and I think this was the most consequential gap in my analysis.

In December 2025, I wrote accurately about the limitations the 12-Day War had exposed in Iran’s underground basing model. Striking tunnel entrances could effectively seal off units even when the missiles and launchers inside remained physically intact. I also wrote about the TEL survivability problem: that moving large transporter-erector-launchers under persistent surveillance from satellites, high-altitude drones, and airborne radar was “extraordinarily difficult.” Both of those observations were correct as descriptions of what happened in June 2025.

Where I fell short was in adequately accounting for how quickly Iran could regenerate usable launch capacity even after absorbing significant attrition to its fixed infrastructure. I treated launcher loss figures as more operationally decisive than they turned out to be. The assumption embedded in my analysis, which I did not state explicitly enough to be held accountable for it, was that destroying a meaningful percentage of Iran’s TEL fleet would produce a roughly proportional decline in launch tempo over time. That is not what happened. Iran demonstrated a greater ability to bring reserve launchers forward, to improvise launch positions from non-standard sites, and to sustain an operational tempo from degraded and dispersed infrastructure than my pre-war writing implied it would.

Part of what I underweighted was the depth of Iran’s reserve launcher pool. The post-war documentary footage I wrote about in December, showing a mix of repaired and newly delivered TELs inside an underground missile base, should have pushed me harder toward a more conservative estimate of how quickly attrition would bite. Instead I leaned too heavily on external estimates of launcher destruction, which in retrospect appear to have captured a real but incomplete picture of how much usable capacity remained outside the struck facilities.

The mobile launcher survivability question is also where the Mosaic Defense architecture matters most in practice, and I think I separated those two things when I should have kept them together. Pre-delegated launch authority is only operationally meaningful if the units holding that authority still have functional launchers and missiles to fire. The fact that Iranian launches continued at the scale they did, for as long as they did, suggests the regenerative capacity of the mobile launcher fleet was more robust than I credited.

The Open Question I Keep Coming Back To

The analytical question I find most interesting, and where I think the most consequential work still needs to be done, is the question of targeting variance across IRGC Aerospace Force divisions. This is genuinely unresolved and I want to be clear that what follows is analytical intuition rather than established fact.

My working hypothesis is that different divisional commands within the IRGC Aerospace Force were operating with meaningfully different target priorities rather than executing a single centrally directed target list. The evidence for this is circumstantial but accumulating. The UAE absorbed a disproportionate share of total attack volume in the Gulf campaign. The targeting logic applied against energy infrastructure differed from that applied against military facilities and shipping in ways that suggest different planning processes rather than a single unified scheme.

Iran’s operational experience in past campaigns gave particular commands and units a depth of knowledge about how specific missile systems performed against specific target types, and about how adversary air defense systems responded to them. It is reasonable to expect that this knowledge shaped targeting choices in ways that varied by unit rather than being applied uniformly from the top down. Tracing those variations requires patient work on launch site patterns, video evidence, and open-source data mapping observable activity to known divisional areas of responsibility. It is the kind of research that takes time and will probably not be fully resolved for months or years.

If you are working on this and have patterns, imagery, or sourcing that bears on it, I want to hear from you.

More to follow as the picture continues to clear.

The ceasefire announced between the United States and Iran on April 7 is, at best, a fragile and contested pause in a conflict that has already shattered multiple “redlines” in the region. It resolves none of the war’s core structural tensions, and the events of the past 24 hours suggest it may not hold at all.

The war itself constituted a major rupture from the regional order that preceded it, but many events within it were each, individually, previously regarded as inviolable redline

Since February 28, the warring parties have engaged in the repeated violation of what were once considered inviolable military and political “redlines”, a pattern that has widened the geographic scope of the conflict and generated profound uncertainty regarding its eventual resolution.

Iran and Israel first crossed the Rubicon of open state-on-state conflict in 2024. Then the United States joined Israel in the June 2025 Twelve-Day War. Those earlier conflicts were marked by limited, tit-for-tat escalation and a telegraphed end. This time was different. 

The assassination of a Supreme Leader, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and Iranian strikes across the GCC represent structural breaks of an entirely different order. The parties have also witnessed a dangerous escalatory shift from military infrastructure to energy facilities, with Israel striking Iran’s South Pars gas field and Iran retaliating against vital oil and gas installations across the Gulf states — a threshold that would itself have been unthinkable prior to the war. 

After more than five weeks of fighting, the United States and Iran agreed on April 7 to a two-week ceasefire that ostensibly included Israel. But a two-week pause, however welcome, resolves nothing structural. The ceasefire announced by Donald Trump is ambitious in scope, contested in interpretation, and absent any resolution of the war’s core drivers. This pattern is not without precedent. The June 2025 ceasefire was already structurally fragile but it resolved no underlying disputes, left Iran’s nuclear ambitions intact if temporarily degraded, and hardened strategic calculations on all sides. The current cessation of hostilities inherits those unresolved contradictions and adds several of its own.

The persistence of Iranian launches during the ceasefire period demands attention. The National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company confirmed this morning that the Lavan Oil Refinery was struck in what it described as a “cowardly attack,” with emergency response and firefighting units dispatched immediately to contain the resulting fires. Whether the strike was carried out by the United States or Israel remains unclear, but it constitutes an unambiguous breach of the ceasefire.

Iran’s continued offensive activity admits of three competing explanations.

The first is operational. Iran’s mosaic defense architecture may be generating semi-autonomous launch activity that does not directly reflect centralized political decision-making. Under this reading, continued strikes are a structural feature of Iran’s military design rather than deliberate political signaling.

The second explanation concerns the Gulf theater specifically. If the Gulf states are not party to a comprehensive ceasefire framework, Tehran retains both the rationale and the political mandate to continue imposing costs on U.S.-aligned energy infrastructure in the region. 

The third explanation concerns Lebanon as a distinct and separate condition. Iran has explicitly conditioned its acceptance of any ceasefire on the inclusion of Lebanon, making a broader halt contingent on an end to the concurrent 2026 Lebanon war against Hezbollah. That condition has grown more acute today, with Israel launching a major strike on Beirut and both Hezbollah and Iran vowing retribution.

Within Iran, the observed pattern of munitions clearance and ordnance destruction may reflect an organized operational pause rather than strategic exhaustion. What superficially resembles a wind-down may, in operational terms, be preparation for a subsequent phase. A comprehensive diplomatic settlement, one that addresses the nuclear question, the Strait of Hormuz, Lebanon, and the broader regional order simultaneously, does not appear to be within reach under present conditions.

The Gulf campaign, in particular, is best understood as a distinct theater within the larger war. Once examined on its own terms, several overlapping but analytically separable lines of effort emerge. They were not cleanly divided, and the pattern almost certainly shifted in response to evolving conditions: the effectiveness of Gulf air and missile defenses, the pace of U.S.-Israeli operations inside Iran, Iranian stock constraints, and other internal dynamics that remain difficult to reconstruct from open sources. Even so, the broader pattern suggests prioritization rather than indiscriminate retaliation. It also suggests that that prioritization changed over time in ways that matter.

At the broadest level, the logic is not hard to see. In the Gulf, Iran was trying to impose costs on the regional architecture that allowed the United States and its partners to generate combat power against Iran from outside Iranian territory. But that architecture is not distributed evenly. Some states matter more for sustainment and rear-area support. Others matter more for air operations, missile defense, naval command, energy exports, or the commercial infrastructure within which coalition operations are embedded. The targeting reflects those differences.

The pattern also shifted over time. The opening phase was broader, noisier, and more geographically expansive, which made sense. In the first days, Iran had incentives to show that it retained regional reach and that multiple Gulf states could be pulled into the battlespace at once. As the campaign continued, the distinctions within the Gulf theater became clearer. In some cases, especially Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the strikes narrowed more toward military and support infrastructure. In others, especially Qatar and the UAE, Iran kept a broader target menu open for longer. That makes the Gulf campaign look less like a single regional barrage and more like a distinct theater that became more differentiated as the war has gone on.

U.S. military assets

The most consistent line of effort across the four weeks was directed at the U.S. military architecture in the Gulf. That campaign was distributed across multiple states, but it was not evenly distributed. Kuwait stood out as the clearest case where Iran appears to have concentrated on American military infrastructure and the support architecture around it.

The two most important nodes there were Ali Al Salem Air Base and Camp Arifjan. Ali Al Salem matters because it is a long-standing forward operating location for U.S. airpower in Kuwait and supports air operations across the northern Gulf and into Iraq. Camp Arifjan matters for a different reason. It is not simply another U.S. facility; it is a logistics and command hub that helps sustain the ground and support architecture behind American operations in theater. Together the two sites represent different layers of U.S. military presence: one tied more directly to airpower, the other to operational sustainment and theater command.

The repeated attention to Camp Arifjan’s radomes is especially notable. Radomes protect communications infrastructure, and the persistence of attacks against them suggests that Iran assigned some priority to satellite communications and related command-and-control nodes. Whether that reflected imperfect battle damage assessment, a desire to prevent repairs, or simply a standing priority on communications targets is difficult to say with confidence. But the pattern is significant. It points to an effort to impose friction on the infrastructure that allows dispersed U.S. forces to operate as a coordinated network.

Kuwait International Airport also appears repeatedly. That can be read in two ways, which are not mutually exclusive. It may reflect a dual-use targeting logic, given the airport’s logistical relevance to U.S. operations, or it may indicate that Iran was willing to accept civilian disruption as part of the coercive effect of targeting military support infrastructure in and around Kuwait City. Either way, Kuwait looks less like a theater of broad economic punishment than a theater where Iran focused on the support systems behind U.S. military operations.

Qatar belongs in this same military line of effort, but it occupies a somewhat different place within it. Al Udeid Air Base is one of the principal hubs for U.S. air operations in the region and a key node for command, coordination, refueling, and the wider air campaign architecture. That made Qatar central in a way that differs from Kuwait’s logistical function or Bahrain’s naval one. Iranian pressure on Qatar, therefore carried a different weight. It was aimed less at rear-area sustainment than at one of the core operational platforms through which air operations against Iran were being organized and supported.

The targets in Qatar also reached radar-related sites, air defense activity around Doha, Doha International Airport, industrial infrastructure, and LNG-linked nodes such as Ras Laffan and Mesaieed. That broadens the picture. Qatar looks less like Kuwait, where the emphasis was more tightly concentrated on support architecture, and more like an intermediate case between a military theater and an industrial pressure theater. Al Udeid remained the centerpiece, but the inclusion of LNG and industrial targets suggests that Iran was willing to hold at risk not only the base complex itself but also some of the economic infrastructure that gives Qatar broader strategic significance.

Bahrain fits into this emphasis on U.S. assets as well, though again in a different way. Bahrain hosts the Fifth Fleet headquarters at Naval Support Activity Bahrain and is one of the most concentrated nodes of U.S. naval command infrastructure in the region. In theory, the density and strategic importance of that target set should have made it a high-priority theater. In practice, the campaign there was more limited than that logic alone would suggest. The most plausible explanation is that Bahrain’s small geography and the concentration of high-value targets alongside dense defensive coverage made it a harder environment in which to achieve meaningful penetration. Put differently, Bahrain appears to have remained a target of real strategic interest, but not a permissive one.

Saudi Arabia presents a more complicated version of the same military logic. Prince Sultan Air Base is one of the most important U.S.-linked airpower nodes in the region, and on paper it should have made Saudi Arabia a major theater from the start. Yet the early phase of the campaign was relatively restrained compared with Kuwait. That may reflect political calibration. Iran may have wanted to avoid early escalation with a state whose role in global energy markets imposed different strategic constraints than those associated with Kuwait or Bahrain. Distance, defenses, and target access may also have mattered. Whatever the reason, Saudi Arabia was initially underweighted relative to the significance of the military assets on its territory.

The economic coercion campaign

If Kuwait was the clearest case of anti-American military targeting, the UAE looks like the center of gravity of something related but distinct: a sustained effort to impose economic costs and generate psychological pressure on a Gulf host state by targeting commercial and civilian infrastructure alongside military-adjacent systems.

What stands out in the Emirati case is not only the volume of activity, but the type of sites that recur. The UAE was treated not simply as a military host state, but as an economically and psychologically vulnerable one. For instance, Dubai International Airport appears repeatedly. So do Abu Dhabi’s urban coastline, the Fujairah Oil Industry Zone, and dense residential and commercial areas tied to the UAE’s expatriate-heavy economy. The target environment in the UAE was not built around one or two major American military nodes. It was broader, and more closely connected to the civilian-commercial systems on which the Emirati economy depends.

Dubai International Airport is the clearest example. It is central to Dubai’s status as a global logistics, financial, and services hub. A campaign against it does not need to shut the airport down permanently to impose costs. It only needs to make operations riskier and less predictable—to raise insurance premiums, disrupt airline planning, unsettle logistics chains, and reinforce the sense that Gulf connectivity cannot be taken for granted under wartime conditions. The same logic applies, in a somewhat different way, to Fujairah. Its significance lies in its role outside the Strait of Hormuz, as an energy storage and loading hub that helps Gulf exporters reduce chokepoint vulnerability.

Qatar partly overlaps with this second line of effort, though in a narrower way. The difference is that in Qatar the economic pressure component appears to have been built around industrial and energy infrastructure rather than around the broader urban-commercial environment. Ras Laffan and Mesaieed matter not because they resemble Dubai, but because they sit at the core of Qatar’s LNG and industrial economy. Qatar therefore does not belong in the same category as the UAE, but it does show that Iranian planners were not rigidly separating military and economic targeting. There were echoes of this logic elsewhere. Bahrain’s port and financial districts, and Kuwait International Airport, show that economic and civilian-adjacent targeting was not unique to the UAE. But nowhere else was it so sustained or so central to the campaign’s overall character.

The late Saudi shift

The most important change over the course of the campaign was not visible on the opening day. It emerged later, when Saudi Arabia became a more active theater and the character of Iranian targeting there changed.

In the early and middle phases, Saudi Arabia absorbed comparatively limited activity relative to the significance of Prince Sultan Air Base and other military infrastructure on its territory. In the final stretch, that changed. Strike activity increased, and more importantly, the target set broadened. Prince Sultan and Riyadh remained relevant, but late in the campaign Iranian attention expanded to include Saudi energy export infrastructure, especially Ras Tannura, Yanbu, and maritime-industrial zones near Al Jubayl.

That shift matters because it was not simply a matter of more strikes on Saudi territory. It represented a move toward targets with potentially global economic consequences. Ras Tannura is not just another oil facility. It is the most important crude export terminal in the world. Yanbu extends the same vulnerability into the Red Sea corridor. A campaign that threatens both Gulf and Red Sea export routes is qualitatively different from one centered only on military bases or local industrial nodes. It suggests awareness not only of Saudi Arabia’s military role, but of its strategic position in global energy markets.

Why this shift occurred when it did is harder to determine. One possibility is that it reflected strategic recalibration after the more visible coercive effects sought in the UAE proved harder to convert into operationally meaningful damage. Another is that the campaign did not slow so much as move: away from a theater where defenses were absorbing a large share of the incoming pressure and toward one where successful penetrations, if achieved, might carry greater global consequences. Either way, the late Saudi phase stands out because it indicates that Iran’s campaign did not remain fixed on its opening priorities. It evolved.

What the campaign reveals

Taken as a whole, Iran has pursuing at least two overlapping lines of effort from the beginning: an anti-American military campaign centered most clearly on Kuwait and, to a lesser degree, Bahrain and Qatar, and an economic coercion campaign centered on the UAE. Later, it expanded pressure on Saudi Arabia.

Interception rates appear to have been high, especially in the opening phase. Some of the most consequential targets seem to have been engaged without producing the kind of sustained operational degradation that would fully validate the logic behind them.

Even without a full comprehension of the level of damage, the targeting logic itself is already visible. Iran appears to have placed greater emphasis than in previous conflicts on the infrastructure that enables military power: communications nodes, support systems, export terminals, transport hubs, industrial facilities, and commercial sites whose continued function depends on perceptions of stability.

If that reflects a real doctrinal evolution rather than wartime improvisation, it matters beyond this campaign. Future Iranian operations in a conflict of this scale may look similar. That has implications not only for base defense, but for how the United States and Gulf states think about force posture, redundancy, and the vulnerability of military operations in the region.

Iran’s approach to deterrence, known as bazdarandegi in Persian, bears the imprint of e…

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Like almost everything with the Iranian military, Iran’s drone program began with the Iran-Iraq War. Cut off from foreign suppliers and increasingly unable to conduct aerial reconnaissance with manned aircraft, Iranian commanders faced a growing intelligence gap on the battlefield. In response, engineers and military units began experimenting with small radio-controlled aircraft equipped with cameras, an improvised attempt to observe Iraqi positions without risking scarce aircraft or pilots.

Early in the war, aerial reconnaissance was carried out by RF-4 Phantom aircraft inherited from the Shah’s air force, which provided the photographs necessary to map Iraqi defensive positions and plan offensives. But by the mid-1980s that capability had deteriorated sharply. Aircraft losses, maintenance shortages, sanctions that restricted spare parts, and the growing risk of flying reconnaissance missions over heavily defended Iraqi territory made regular aerial photography increasingly difficult. Without those images, commanders preparing major operations faced the prospect of planning attacks with incomplete or outdated information.

The loss of reconnaissance created a tactical gap that ground intelligence could not fill. Iranian reconnaissance patrols could observe Iraqi front lines, but they could not safely penetrate deep defensive networks without suffering heavy casualties. The Intelligence and Operations Unit of Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters, the IRGC’s main operational command, relied heavily on aerial imagery to map Iraqi defensive systems, artillery positions, and troop movements. When the air force began restricting reconnaissance flights in 1983 due to aircraft shortages and operational risks, Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters was effectively left without a reliable way to observe Iraqi rear positions.

Domestic Research

The earliest research and development effort for an indigenous drone program emerged from a combination of wartime necessity, existing aerospace infrastructure, and experimentation within Iran’s universities. One important piece of that ecosystem was the Iranian Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company (HESA) in Isfahan. Before the revolution, HESA had been established to produce light aircraft and trainer jets for the Imperial Iranian Air Force as part of the Shah’s broader effort to develop a domestic aviation industry. After the revolution severed Iran from foreign suppliers and spare parts, much of that industrial base was left without the components required to continue licensed aircraft production. Engineers at facilities like HESA, therefore, began turning toward projects that could be pursued with domestically available materials, including small unmanned aircraft.

At the same time, early exploratory work on unmanned systems had begun within the defense establishment itself. Mostafa Chamran, who served as a senior figure in the Ministry of Defense during the early years of the war, reportedly initiated preliminary efforts to explore remotely controlled aircraft for reconnaissance. The first practical advances, however, came from outside formal military laboratories. Engineering teams associated with the university jihad movement—particularly at Isfahan University, Isfahan University of Technology, Sharif University of Technology, and Shiraz University—began experimenting with remotely controlled model aircraft capable of carrying lightweight cameras.

Among these efforts, the group working through the University Jihad workshop in Isfahan achieved the first meaningful breakthrough, building a small aircraft able to capture aerial photographs from altitude. These early systems were essentially modified model aircraft, constructed from lightweight materials and powered by small engines similar to those used in hobby aircraft. Cameras were mounted inside the fuselage and triggered during flight to capture aerial imagery. Under the supervision of commanders from Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters, these prototypes were eventually tested near the war front, where engineers from the Isfahan team flew aircraft capable of photographing Iraqi positions. The results were encouraging enough that IRGC commanders concluded that such systems could partially replace conventional reconnaissance flights. The Isfahan workshop effectively became the nucleus of Iran’s early UAV development effort.

From these experiments emerged the first operational Iranian unmanned aircraft. One of the earliest platforms was the Talash series, a small reconnaissance UAV designed to carry cameras and provide aerial imagery of enemy positions. These aircraft were relatively simple but proved capable of flying over Iraqi defensive lines and returning with photographs that could be developed and analyzed by intelligence officers. The Talash designs evolved into successive variants—Talash 1, 2, and 3.

The experience gained from operating Talash aircraft eventually led to the development of a more capable reconnaissance platform: the Mohajer UAV. Compared to the earlier Talash models, Mohajer incorporated a stronger engine, improved endurance, and a more stable airframe capable of carrying heavier camera systems. These improvements allowed the aircraft to fly deeper behind Iraqi lines and capture clearer imagery of defensive networks, artillery positions, and troop deployments.

The First Iranian Drone Unit

As these experimental aircraft began producing usable reconnaissance imagery, the IRGC leadership moved to institutionalize the effort. A dedicated UAV reconnaissance element was formed under the name Raʿd Battalion, an intelligence unit tasked with supplying aerial photography to operational planners. The battalion was first stationed in Ahvaz, near the main southern fronts, and later operated from encampments closer to active battle zones under the supervision of Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters, the IRGC’s central operational command. In practice, Raʿd never possessed the personnel or structure implied by the term “battalion”; it was a small group of pilots, technicians, and engineers working with improvised equipment and experimental aircraft. Its purpose was narrowly defined but operationally critical: to replace the aerial imagery that had previously been supplied by RF-4 and F-5 reconnaissance flights, which had become increasingly restricted due to aircraft shortages and the risks of flying over heavily defended Iraqi territory.

Despite its modest size, the unit quickly became an important intelligence asset. Raʿd’s UAV teams conducted reconnaissance flights over Iraqi defensive positions and returned with aerial photographs that were rapidly developed and distributed to commanders for operational planning. These images were used to redraw battlefield maps, identify minefields and fortified positions, locate artillery and troop concentrations, and verify or correct information gathered through ground reconnaissance. In several respects the UAV imagery proved superior to earlier reconnaissance methods. Because the aircraft flew at relatively low altitudes and could approach specific target areas repeatedly, they produced close-range images from multiple angles that high-altitude aircraft often failed to capture. The photographs were also processed and delivered more quickly than traditional aerial reconnaissance imagery.

From Mohajer to Shahed

After the Iran–Iraq War, the UAV effort that had begun as an improvised reconnaissance program gradually evolved into a structured research and production effort inside Iran’s defense industry. The early Mohajer and Ababil drones provided the technological foundation. Mohajer remained primarily a reconnaissance platform, evolving through successive variants such as Mohajer-2, Mohajer-3, and Mohajer-4, while the Ababil family developed into a versatile UAV used for surveillance, target acquisition, and occasionally attack missions.

Much of the technological progress in the 1990s and 2000s came from a combination of reverse engineering, battlefield capture, and gradual adaptation of foreign systems. Iranian engineers studied the designs of Israeli UAVs that had appeared over Lebanese and Palestinian battlefields, and some later Iranian systems closely resembled aircraft such as the Israeli Hermes-450. In fact, the Iranian Shahed-123 reconnaissance drone was essentially a reverse-engineered version of the Hermes-450 design.

Iran also acquired additional insight into Western drone technology through captured systems. In 2011, Iranian forces brought down a U.S. RQ-170 Sentinel stealth reconnaissance drone that had been operating over Iranian territory from Afghanistan. The captured drone became a major windfall for Iran’s drone development program. Iranian engineers subsequently produced several UAVs modeled on the aircraft’s flying-wing configuration, including the Shahed-171 Simorgh and Shahed-191 Saeqeh, both of which replicate aspects of the Sentinel’s design and incorporate Iranian avionics and weapons systems.

Iran continued developing larger surveillance and strike drones with more conventional airframes. One of the most important of these was the Shahed-129, a medium-altitude long-endurance drone developed in the 2000s and introduced publicly in the early 2010s.

The most widely recognized Iranian drone today, however, is the Shahed-136, a loitering munition designed to fly long distances and strike targets directly rather than return to base. Unlike the Mohajer and Ababil systems, which grew out of the reconnaissance drones developed during the Iran–Iraq War, the Shahed family reflects a different technological lineage tracing back to West German research on anti-radar drones, particularly the Drohne Anti-Radar project. Variants of this idea later appeared in South Africa in the 1980s, before reaching a more mature operational form with Israel Aerospace Industries’ Harpy in the 1990s, a loitering munition designed to destroy enemy radar systems. By the 2000s, Iranian engineers appear to have gained access—through reverse engineering or indirect acquisition—to elements of this technology. The result was the Shahed-131 and later the larger Shahed-136, which adapted the loitering munition concept to Iran’s strategy of low-cost, long-range systems that can be deployed in large numbers. Today, Iran, Russia, Israel, the Houthis, and the United States all have some connection to the Shahed.

Anyway, here is the book for those who can read Persian (پهپاد در دفاع مقدس).

The broader context is a technology transfer agreement between Iran and Russia that began after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Rather than simply exporting finished drones, Iran agreed to supply Russia with complete systems, assembly kits, engineering documentation, and training that would allow Russian industry to eventually produce the drone locally. According to reporting based on internal project documents and Western intelligence assessments, Iran initially delivered hundreds of complete drones and disassembled kits, while the long-term plan called for Russia to build several thousand drones domestically. Early project documents reportedly set a production target of roughly 6,000 Shahed-type drones over several years, with the expectation that Russia would gradually localize production and reduce reliance on Iranian-supplied components.

The Alabuga facility became the centerpiece of this effort. Satellite imagery and reporting showed the site expanding rapidly as new industrial buildings were constructed to support drone manufacturing. The project involved hundreds of workers and technicians, including individuals trained in Iran on the assembly and manufacturing process. Over time, Russia’s goal was to fully absorb the production process, allowing the Geran-2 to be produced at scale inside Russia—something they have achieved today.

I write at greater length about the historical evolution of Iran-Russia defense cooperation in my book, but the most interesting document from the Alabuga leaks is a 241-slide PowerPoint presentation that lays out the manufacturing process in remarkable detail. The presentation is titled “Motor Boat Production Technology” (Технология производства моторной лодки), a cover label that appears to have been used to disguise the nature of the project. In reality, the slides function as a complete step-by-step guide to building a Shahed airframe, covering everything from mold preparation and composite fabrication to structural assembly, fuel-system installation, painting, and final balance testing.

Before walking through what the document shows, it is important to include an important caveat. The drones Russia now fields under the Geran designation are not necessarily identical to the original Iranian Shahed-136. Over the course of the war in Ukraine, Russian engineers have modified the system in several ways. These changes reportedly include improved satellite navigation modules tied to Russia’s GLONASS system, redesigned anti-jamming antennas, replacement of some Western commercial electronics with Russian components, and experiments with different warhead configurations, including heavier payloads. Some recovered drones have also shown differences in internal wiring layouts, electronics placement, and structural reinforcement compared with early Iranian models.

This matters for interpreting the leaked manual because the slides likely reflect the baseline Iranian production process that was transferred to Russia during the initial phase of cooperation. The Geran-2 drones currently used in Ukraine include modifications that go beyond what is described in the original. At the same time, there are indications that Iran may have incorporated some lessons from Russia’s wartime adaptations in this current war but confirming this remains difficult. We have not yet been able to conduct systematic debris analysis of newly produced Iranian drones that would show whether those upgrades have fed back into Iranian production lines.

With that caveat in mind, this is how Russia learned how to manufacture a Shahed.

Shahed 101

The process begins with preparing molds for each structural component of the drone, including the nose cone, fuselage panels, access hatches, vertical fins, and structural elements. Workers are instructed to clean the mold surfaces thoroughly, removing dust, debris, and resin residue. In one section describing the production of the nose cone, the manual instructs technicians to “clean the mold surface of dust and contamination and blow it with compressed air,” removing any resin overflow with a scraper without damaging the working surface. If cracks or chips appear in the mold, workers repair them with filler materials before continuing.

Once the mold surface is clean, technicians apply a release compound to prevent the composite structure from sticking during curing. The instructions specify applying the release agent, waiting 15 minutes, and then polishing it until the surface becomes smooth and glossy. In cases where a mold is used for the first time, the procedure must be repeated at least three times. Protective tape is then applied to mold flanges to prevent resin contamination during the forming process.

The next stage involves preparing the composite materials themselves. The manual instructs workers to cut fiberglass and carbon-fiber fabrics according to engineering templates. For example, the nose cone assembly requires fiberglass fabric RE100 and carbon fabric RC200, which are cut according to specific engineering drawings referenced in the document. Workers perform the cutting on a worktable using knives or cutting tools, ensuring that each layer matches the geometry required for the component.

Once the fabrics are prepared, technicians mix the epoxy binder that will hold the composite layers together. The slides specify a two-component epoxy system consisting of CR122 resin and CH122-5 hardener, mixed in a 100:30 ratio by weight. The total amount of resin is determined by the mass of the composite fabrics, with the document recommending a roughly 1:1 ratio between resin and fabric weight to ensure proper saturation.

After mixing the resin, workers begin the composite layup process. A thin layer of epoxy binder is first brushed onto the mold surface. The manual then instructs technicians to “place the cut glass fabric RE100 into the mold and impregnate it with epoxy binder using a brush or spatula.” The resin must be evenly distributed throughout the material. After the fiberglass layer is saturated, workers place a layer of carbon fabric RC200 (or its equivalent XC200) on top of it. Additional reinforcement strips made from unidirectional carbon fabric (UTC200) are placed in specific areas to strengthen the structure.

Once the composite layers are arranged, the part undergoes vacuum curing. Several layers of materials are added on top of the composite stack, including peel-ply fabric, perforated film, and drainage cloth. The assembly is then sealed inside a vacuum bag and connected to a pump that removes air from the system. This process compresses the composite layers while the resin cures. The slides specify a curing cycle at approximately 25C for 6–8 hours, allowing the resin to harden and form a rigid composite structure.

Many of the drone’s large structural components use sandwich construction to increase stiffness while minimizing weight. After the first composite skin is cured, workers cut and install a 5-millimeter honeycomb core in designated areas. The honeycomb is bonded using adhesives such as Araldite 2011 mixed with aerosil, and the structure is vacuum-bagged again before additional composite layers are applied on top.

Then, the factory produces the major structural parts of the airframe, including the upper and lower fuselage panels, vertical stabilizers (referred to as “keel washers”), access hatches, and internal structural elements such as spars and ribs. After curing, each component is removed from the mold and trimmed using power tools to remove excess material. The document even specifies weight targets for some components. For example, the completed lower fuselage panel is expected to weigh approximately 8,500 grams ±200 grams, while the full set of internal spars and ribs is expected to weigh around 6,000 grams ±200 grams.

After the structural components are produced, the process moves to airframe assembly. Internal spars and ribs are aligned inside the fuselage using laser tools, with tolerances as tight as 0.1 degrees from vertical alignment. The structural frame is bonded into the fuselage shell using epoxy adhesives and reinforced with additional composite strips. Workers then install the fuel tank, fuel lines, and mounting brackets for electronic components.

The manual also describes integrating internal systems such as the fuel tank, wiring channels, avionics mounting points, and control linkages. Control surfaces such as elevons are cut from the composite wing panels and reinforced before installation. Fuel system components are then installed inside the fuselage.

After assembly is complete, the drone undergoes a post-curing cycle at 60–70C for approximately eight hours, allowing the epoxy resin to reach its maximum strength and relieving internal stresses within the composite structure. The fuel tank is then filled with gasoline and tested for leaks.

The final stages involve finishing and quality control. The manual describes performing a “coin test,” where technicians tap the surface with a metal object to detect internal voids or delamination. If defects are found, resin is injected to repair them. The airframe is then sanded, filled, and painted. Before and after painting, the drone is weighed, with the document specifying a final weight of approximately 37.5 kilograms ±500 grams.

The last step is balance testing. The drone is suspended from a bracket while technicians measure pitch and roll angles using lasers and inclinometers. These measurements are taken both with an empty fuel tank and with a full tank to ensure the aircraft maintains the correct center of gravity in operational conditions.

What the leaked Alabuga documents ultimately show is that the Shahed is not some improvised weapon assembled in garages, as it is sometimes portrayed. The slides lay out a structured manufacturing process that looks much closer to small-aircraft production than to ad hoc weapons assembly. Step by step, the manual walks through how the airframe is built from fiberglass and carbon-fiber composites using molds, vacuum curing, honeycomb reinforcement, and modular assembly. Workers clean and prepare molds, cut fiberglass and carbon fabrics to templates, mix epoxy resin in precise ratios, lay up composite layers, vacuum-bag and cure them, and then trim, assemble, and test the resulting components.

Now, as there is increasing speculation about how many drones Iran currently has, how quickly it can produce them, and what it may have learned from Russia’s wartime use of the Geran, these documents are particularly valuable for grounding those debates in something more concrete. The documents do not answer every question about Iran’s current stockpile or output, but it provides a rare window into the baseline manufacturing model that makes large-scale production possible in the first place.

A serious analysis of Iran’s February 28 operations has to begin with the conditions under which they were carried out. U.S. and Israeli forces began conducting joint strikes on Iran at approximately 09:45 IRST, launching nearly 900 strikes in the first twelve hours. The opening wave reportedly targeted the compound of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, killing him alongside dozens of senior officials. In parallel, U.S. Cyber Command appears to have been the operational first mover, initiating cyber operations before any kinetic strikes were launched. These attacks targeted Iran’s digital backbone, degrading internet connectivity to an estimated one to four percent of normal levels through layered disruptions to BGP routing, DNS infrastructure, and industrial control systems. Within the same operational window, IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour and Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh were also killed.

That Iranian ballistic missiles were already in flight against targets across the Gulf within hours of these strikes is therefore the central operational fact that requires explanation. The near-simultaneity of retaliatory launches across multiple countries, carried out under conditions of leadership decapitation and severe communications disruption, suggests that elements of Iran’s retaliatory architecture were either pre-delegated, pre-planned, or capable of functioning under highly degraded command-and-control conditions.

Following Khamenei’s death, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced that Iran had activated what he described as its Mosaic Defense strategy (I wrote about this a bit in my previous post). The concept, developed over the past two decades within the IRGC, is designed to disperse command structures, weapons systems, and operational units across wide geographic areas so that the system can continue functioning even after leadership decapitation or severe disruption to communications.

In practical military terms, such a framework relies on pre-delegation of authorities and preplanned strike packages. IRGC Aerospace Force missile brigades and battalions appear to operate with assigned target sets and contingency launch procedures designed to be executed if communications with higher headquarters are severed. Provincial and regional commanders are widely believed to hold sealed operational instructions or conditional orders intended for precisely this scenario, allowing retaliatory operations to proceed even in a degraded command-and-control environment.

The sustained and geographically distributed missile launches in the hours following the initial strikes, therefore, suggest that elements of Iran’s command-and-control architecture remained functional. However, it is difficult to determine from open sources the degree to which these launches reflected surviving centralized coordination versus execution of pre-delegated contingency plans.

Three Parallel Targeting Campaigns

When examined at the operational level, Iran’s February 28 retaliation does not appear as a single undifferentiated strike campaign. Instead, the attacks can be disaggregated into three overlapping targeting efforts that unfolded in parallel, each with a distinct set of targets, a different mix of weapons, and a different strategic logic. These campaigns were not perfectly executed, and the available information remains incomplete, but the overall pattern suggests a degree of planning and prioritization rather than indiscriminate retaliation.

Attacks on U.S. Command, Control, and ISR Infrastructure

The most operationally significant pattern on February 28 was the concentration of strikes on American command, control, communications, and intelligence (C2/ISR) infrastructure across the Gulf. Many of the strikes appear to have focused on specific nodes that enable U.S. power projection in the region, particularly the communications architecture that links forward bases, naval forces, and airborne ISR platforms into a single operational network.

Several of the early attacks were directed at facilities that serve as communications hubs for U.S. regional operations. At Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, Iranian drones reportedly struck and destroyed multiple radomes—large geodesic dome structures that protect satellite communications antennas. These radomes house equipment used for long-distance command links and ISR data transmission, allowing U.S. forces in the Gulf to maintain connectivity with theater command centers and with assets operating across the region. Radomes are precise and technically identifiable aimpoints. Their selection suggests that Iranian planners were drawing on a targeting database developed over time, likely informed by satellite imagery, long-term observation of U.S. installations, and detailed analysis of publicly visible basing infrastructure—potentially supplemented by intelligence or technical insights from partners such as Russia.

A similar pattern appeared at the Naval Support Activity in Bahrain, where a drone strike reportedly destroyed two AN/GSC-52B satellite communications terminals, which support communications for the United States Fifth Fleet headquarters. Naval Support Activity Bahrain hosts the Fifth Fleet’s operational command facilities and serves as the central hub for U.S. naval operations in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and parts of the Arabian Sea. The AN/GSC-52B terminals function as high-capacity satellite ground stations within the U.S. military’s wideband communications architecture, enabling the transmission of operational orders, intelligence data, and targeting information between fleet headquarters and deployed ships, aircraft, and surveillance platforms.

These systems handle large volumes of secure voice and data traffic, allowing maritime forces operating hundreds or thousands of kilometers away to remain integrated into the theater command structure. The destruction of such terminals would not disable the Fifth Fleet or sever communications entirely, since U.S. military networks are designed with redundancy and alternative routing pathways. However, they are high-value communications nodes, and damage to them can temporarily complicate the flow of operational information between command elements and deployed naval forces

Likewise, at Al Udeid Air Base, drones damaged communications and satellite equipment associated with U.S. air operations. Al Udeid functions as a major operational hub for American airpower in the Middle East, hosting command facilities and communications systems that support the coordination of strike aircraft, surveillance platforms, and aerial refueling assets.

Elsewhere, a radar installation at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base was struck by a ballistic missile. The base hosts U.S. and coalition aircraft and functions as an important forward operating location supporting air operations over Syria, Iraq, and the eastern Mediterranean. Open-source reporting indicates that the strike damaged infrastructure associated with a THAAD missile-defense battery, including the AN/TPY-2 radar, a high-power X-band system used for long-range detection and tracking of ballistic missiles. The radar feeds data into the broader regional air and missile defense architecture linking interceptors, command centers, and early-warning networks across the Gulf and Levant.

A strike against radar infrastructure at such a location is consistent with a broader effort to disrupt the sensor layer that enables air defense and air operations coordination. Systems like AN/TPY-2 provide early detection and tracking information that allows interceptors to engage incoming missiles and enables commanders to maintain situational awareness across a wide battlespace. Even temporary degradation of such sensors can reduce detection timelines, complicate interception sequences, and force greater reliance on more distant or redundant sensors. In that sense, the strike fits the wider pattern of Iranian attacks on communications and ISR infrastructure across the region, targeting the technical nodes that underpin U.S. operational networks rather than simply the bases themselves.

From an Iranian perspective, this type of targeting would make operational sense in the opening phase of a conflict. U.S. and Israeli forces were conducting strikes inside Iran at a moment of maximum operational tempo, relying heavily on ISR networks, satellite communications, and inter-base coordination to sustain the pace of operations. Even limited disruptions to those systems could complicate targeting cycles, delay information flows, and increase friction within the operational network during the first hours of the war.

This targeting pattern is also notable because it differs in important ways from earlier Iranian strike campaigns, including the June 2025 twelve-day war and previous Operation True Promise retaliatory strikes. In those earlier operations, Iranian missiles and drones were primarily directed toward air bases, runways, and symbolic military targets, often in large salvoes designed to demonstrate reach and impose psychological pressure rather than to systematically degrade operational networks. The February 28 strikes, by contrast, appear more focused on technical infrastructure that enables U.S. and coalition operations—radomes, satellite terminals, and radar systems. Rather than emphasizing visible kinetic damage to bases themselves, the targeting suggests an attempt to disrupt the enabling architecture behind those bases, particularly the communications and sensor networks that allow dispersed forces to function as an integrated operational system. Even if the physical damage was limited,

Whether the strikes actually produced meaningful operational degradation is difficult to determine from open sources. U.S. systems are designed to absorb damage and maintain continuity through redundant pathways. But the broader point remains: the pattern of Iranian targeting suggests a deliberate attempt to disrupt the communications architecture that underpins U.S. regional military operations, rather than simply to strike American forces wherever they were located.

Economic Infrastructure

A second campaign unfolded simultaneously against Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states hosting U.S. military infrastructure, but here the targeting logic looks different from the strikes on U.S. C2 and ISR nodes. Iran reportedly launched 137 ballistic missiles and 209 drones toward the UAE, the largest single-country barrage of the day. Bahrain received dozens of missiles and drones, while Qatar was also struck repeatedly. In many cases the excess volume was directed not at military installations but at civilian and economic infrastructure.

Much of it landed on or near civilian and economic infrastructure, a pattern too consistent and too dispersed to be incidental. Several of the struck targets carried obvious signal value. A drone ignited the outer façade of the Burj Al Arab, one of the most globally recognized symbols of Gulf prosperity and ambition. The passenger terminal at Kuwait International Airport was damaged, injuring migrant workers and grounding commercial flights at a hub central to regional connectivity. A residential tower on Palm Jumeirah was hit, bringing the conflict into one of the most internationally visible real estate developments in the world. Drones also struck buildings in Seef, Bahrain’s financial district. None of these targets was militarily decisive. All of them were chosen, or at a minimum resulted in effects that were economically and psychologically legible to governments, investors, and insurers watching from outside the region.

Iran’s apparent logic was cost imposition on the host states as political actors, not merely as platforms for American power. Gulf economies are structurally exposed to exactly the kind of disruption these strikes were designed to generate. Aviation connectivity, tourism receipts, financial services, and maritime trade form the backbone of economic diversification programs that Gulf governments have staked considerable domestic legitimacy on. Even limited and localized attacks can produce outsized downstream effects: war-risk insurance premiums rise, airlines reroute or suspend service, hotel occupancy falls, and foreign direct investment decisions are quietly deferred. Tehran’s calculation appears to have been that inflicting these costs would create internal pressure within Gulf governments to seek an off-ramp, either by directly lobbying Washington for de-escalation or by quietly withdrawing the operational cooperation that sustains American strike capacity in the theater.

The political logic rests on a longstanding Iranian reading of the Gulf security environment. GCC states host the infrastructure that makes sustained U.S. military operations in the region possible. However, Tehran has consistently assessed that Gulf governments are not fully committed partners of Washington but rather states managing a precarious balance, seeking the security guarantee the U.S. presence provides while remaining wary of the costs that come with it. By striking economic infrastructure rather than confining itself to American military targets, Iran appears to have been testing whether that balance could be disrupted — whether the cost of hosting U.S. forces could be made tangible enough, and visible enough to domestic audiences and foreign investors alike, to shift the political calculus in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Manama, and Doha.

Israeli Population Centers

Unlike the June 2025 Twelve-Day War, the initial retaliation against Israel occurred relatively quickly after the opening strikes on Iran, suggesting that the IRGC Aerospace Force was able to begin launches even under conditions of leadership decapitation and communications disruption. At the same time, the overall volume of missiles fired was lower than during the earlier conflict. This likely reflects a combination of factors, including the degradation of Iranian launch infrastructure from the initial air campaign and the need to disperse strikes across multiple regional theaters.

Iran launched roughly 20 separate ballistic missile barrages that day, typically consisting of only two to four missiles each, for a total of approximately 125 missiles. The majority of the strikes were directed toward central urban areas, including Tel Aviv, Bnei Brak, Kafr Qaseem, Tirat Carmel, Jerusalem, Beer Sheva, Ramat Gan, Petah Tikva, and Rosh Haayin. Several missiles penetrated Israeli air defenses and landed in populated areas. One strike in Tel Aviv killed a civilian and injured dozens, while fragments and impacts caused injuries and property damage across the greater Tel Aviv metropolitan area.

The geographic distribution of strikes—heavily concentrated in Israel’s main population and economic corridor—suggests that the primary objective was not to destroy Israeli military infrastructure but to impose civilian disruption and psychological pressure. Rather than relying on a small number of large missile waves, Iran fired smaller barrages repeatedly throughout the day, sustaining frequent alerts and forcing civilians across central Israel into shelters.

This targeting pattern differs from earlier Iranian operations such as Operation True Promise I and II, where missile strikes were largely framed as retaliation against Israeli military infrastructure, including airbases and security installations. For example, Operation True Promise II in October 2024 targeted Israeli military facilities such as Nevatim Airbase and Tel Nof Airbase, emphasizing symbolic retaliation and the demonstration of Iranian reach. On February 28, by contrast, the strikes appear more consistently directed toward urban and economic centers, particularly in the Tel Aviv metropolitan region.

In many ways, the approach more closely resembles the later stages of Operation True Promise III during the Twelve-Day War, when Iranian launches increasingly shifted toward sustained disruption of civilian life rather than purely military targets. The apparent lesson Tehran may have drawn from that conflict was not simply to fire more missiles, but to structure missile use in ways that maximize societal and economic disruption, even when the overall volume of fire is lower.

The initial strikes on February 28 are likely to stand as one of the most analytically important days of the conflict. It marked the largest geographically coordinated Iranian strike operation in the history of the Islamic Republic, with missiles and drones launched across multiple theaters simultaneously—from Israel to the Gulf and beyond—raising important questions about the resilience of Iran’s command architecture and the degree of pre-delegation embedded in IRGC retaliatory planning. The strikes also reveal a shift in Iranian targeting logic. Rather than focusing primarily on symbolic military targets, as in earlier operations such as Operation True Promise I and II, the campaign emphasized the enabling infrastructure behind military power—communications nodes, radars, and satellite terminals—while simultaneously imposing economic pressure on Gulf host states and directing strikes toward civilian centers in Israel. Finally, the operation provides an early indication of how Iran may attempt to fight under conditions of leadership decapitation and degraded communications, as retaliatory launches still occurred across several regions within hours despite the killing of senior officials and widespread disruption to Iran’s communications networks.

I will try to post additional day-by-day analysis of the strikes and targeting patterns as more information becomes available. Much of what we currently know comes from fragmented reporting, satellite imagery, and early official statements. As more imagery, technical assessments, and operational details emerge, the picture of how these strikes were planned and executed will likely become clearer.

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There are structural limits to what analysts can confidently assess in real time. We do not have satellite imagery of every strike site, and several of the large data aggregators collecting battlefield information have been cautious about what they release publicly to researchers. There are developments I feel reasonably confident about based on the information available, but there are also many claims—about damage, targeting, and operational outcomes—that I remain hesitant to treat as definitive.

For that reason, rather than attempting to produce a day-by-day accounting of strikes or targeting patterns (topics I am covering in pieces currently in progress), I think it is more useful to step back and focus on the major trends and analytical questions that may shape the remainder of the war.

Elite Schisms

The internal political picture in Tehran is one of the most consequential variables to watch as the war unfolds. With Mojtaba Khamenei formally appointed Supreme Leader on March 8, some degree of elite jockeying was always expected. Yet even before the succession question formally emerged, several power centers were already visible in the wartime decision-making process.

In the immediate aftermath of the appointment, key political leaders, the IRGC, and the armed forces quickly pledged their backing. On the surface, this signals cohesion. The rapid alignment around Mojtaba likely reflects a deliberate effort by the system’s core institutions to project stability at a moment of profound external pressure. In many ways, Mojtaba appears to function as a continuity candidate: a figure acceptable to the principal power centers within the Islamic Republic, including the IRGC leadership, segments of the clerical establishment, and senior political elites.

That consensus itself is revealing. In a moment that Iranian leaders are likely framing internally as an existential crisis, the priority appears to have been regime continuity rather than elite competition. Mojtaba’s appointment likely reflects a calculation among Iran’s core institutions to maintain a recognizable leadership structure and avoid prolonged succession disputes as essential to preserving regime stability during wartime.

At the same time, it remains unclear whether Mojtaba’s elevation represents a long-term consolidation of power or a temporary consensus arrangement designed to stabilize the system during the conflict. Iranian political history suggests that moments of crisis often produce provisional arrangements that are later renegotiated once immediate pressures subside.

Even with the leadership question formally settled, the Iranian system has never operated as a simple hierarchy. Several influential actors appear to be playing prominent roles in shaping the regime’s wartime posture.

Figures such as Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf and Ali Larijani have been particularly visible in political messaging and regional outreach. Both are seasoned political operators with deep ties across Iran’s security and political institutions, and their reemergence in prominent roles suggests that the system is relying on experienced figures capable of managing both domestic politics and regional diplomacy.

At the same time, the operational dimension of the war appears to be increasingly shaped by Khatam al-Anbiya, the central operational command structure responsible for coordinating large-scale military operations. In practice, this suggests that wartime authority may be distributed across multiple nodes: political leadership managing messaging and diplomacy, while the IRGC and military command structures retain significant influence over operational decisions.

This dynamic reflects a longstanding feature of the Islamic Republic: power is dispersed across overlapping institutions rather than concentrated in a single decision-maker. Even under a strong Supreme Leader, Iran’s political system functions through negotiation and coordination among key institutions, including the IRGC, clerical networks, and political elites.

The most important question, therefore, is not simply whether divisions exist. They almost certainly do. The Iranian system has always contained internal rivalries and competing perspectives.

The more consequential issue is whether those differences begin to translate into meaningful divergences.

So far, the rapid alignment behind Mojtaba suggests that the system is prioritizing cohesion in the face of external pressure. But as the war continues and its costs accumulate, the balance between institutional unity and internal competition will become one of the key indicators of how resilient the regime actually is.

Regional Delegation

From the opening hours of the conflict, Iran appears to have activated what it sometimes called the Mosaic Defense (defa-e mozaiki), a doctrine developed inside the IRGC over the past two decades. Under this system, launch authority is not tightly centralized in Tehran. Instead, operational authority is distributed across 31 provincial IRGC commands, each with pre-delegated authority to execute strike packages against pre-designated targets without waiting for real-time approval from national leadership.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi publicly acknowledged this structure on March 1, just hours after the opening strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour.

“Our military units are now independent and somehow isolated, and they are acting based on instructions — general instructions — given to them in advance.”

This architecture dates back to reforms introduced by former IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jafari in 2005, when the organization reorganized itself from a more conventional hierarchical force into 31 semi-autonomous provincial commands. Each unit functions as a self-contained operational cell with its own command structure, weapons stockpiles, and contingency plans. Succession planning extends several ranks downward, meaning that even the loss of senior leadership does not halt operations. This was shaped by Iranian observations of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Iranian planners concluded that highly centralized militaries collapse quickly under sustained precision strikes and leadership decapitation, while decentralized networks—especially those embedded in local terrain and society—are far more resilient.

The early operational pattern of this war reflects that design. Iranian missile launches continued even after the deaths of senior political and military leaders, and the IRGC has described a series of successive strike “waves” over multiple days. This behavior is far more consistent with a distributed launch system executing pre-authorized plans than with a centrally controlled military attempting to rebuild command after decapitation.

There are also operational limits built into the model. A decentralized network is well-suited for executing pre-planned strike packages and sustaining attritional retaliation. It is much less effective at coordinating complex, large-scale offensive operations across multiple domains. Early launch data may reflect this constraint: even as Iranian strikes continued, the scale of missile salvos appears to have declined as the war progressed.

What interests me most going forward is what this delegation tells us about Iran’s actual operational performance and command dynamics in wartime.

First is the level of autonomy exercised by provincial IRGC commands. The Mosaic Defense assumes that units can operate semi-independently once a conflict begins. But it remains unclear how much discretion these commanders actually have in practice. Are they executing rigid pre-written strike packages, or do they have latitude to adjust targeting, timing, and weapon selection based on battlefield conditions?

Second is the issue of coordination across the distributed network. The doctrine is designed to ensure continuity of operations even if central leadership is degraded, but that resilience may come at the cost of operational synchronization. Large, coordinated missile salvos or multi-axis campaigns require a degree of planning and communication that decentralized systems can struggle to sustain under pressure.

Third is the question of command authority during wartime disruptions. The opening strikes eliminated senior leadership figures, yet Iranian retaliation continued almost immediately. That suggests that operational authority had already been delegated well before the conflict began. What is less clear is how much Tehran is currently shaping the campaign versus how much the system is simply executing pre-authorized plans.

Fourth is the performance of the system under attrition. A distributed structure may allow launches to continue even after individual units are degraded, but it also means that each provincial command relies on its own stockpiles and launch infrastructure. Once those resources begin to erode, it becomes harder to sustain a consistent tempo of operations.

Iran’s Performance in the Gulf

Another theater that deserves close attention is Iran’s performance in the Gulf. For decades, Iran’s strategy in this region rested on the assumption that it could threaten energy infrastructure, maritime trade, and U.S. bases across the Gulf monarchies in order to impose global economic costs on its adversaries.

So far in this war, Iran has attempted to activate that playbook but the results have been mixed.

Iranian attacks have targeted oil and energy infrastructure, shipping, and industrial sites across the Gulf, including tanker attacks near Oman, strikes on refineries and industrial facilities in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and attacks on port infrastructure in Bahrain and Kuwait. These attacks appear designed less to destroy large volumes of infrastructure and more to generate disruption and uncertainty across energy markets.

At the same time, the maritime domain has been significantly disrupted. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has sharply declined, and international commercial traffic has largely withdrawn from the waterway due to the risk environment created by Iranian threats and attacks. Iran has succeeded in demonstrating that it can still disrupt Gulf trade and energy flows. But it has also taken a political risk by striking Gulf states directly. In some cases, those states (particularly the UAE) received large volumes of missiles and drones, forcing them to reconsider their security posture toward Iran.

This raises an important question going forward. Iran’s traditional strategy relied on deterrence through economic vulnerability—the threat that escalation would endanger global energy supplies. But if Gulf states begin to align more closely with U.S. and Israeli operations as a result of these strikes, Iran may be weakening the very regional environment that previously helped sustain its model of deterrence.

Missiles, Drones, and the Question of Operational Performance

Iran’s missile force has been the central instrument of its retaliation, but the war is also beginning to reveal important questions about the resilience and operational performance of that force under sustained pressure.

For decades, Iran invested heavily in ballistic missiles as a substitute for conventional airpower. Sanctions, technological constraints, and the legacy of the Iran–Iraq War pushed Tehran toward a doctrine built around dispersal, survivability, and sustained retaliation rather than decisive battlefield dominance. The assumption was that even under intense air campaigns, Iran would retain enough launch capacity to continue firing missiles and impose costs on its adversaries.

This war is now testing that assumption in real time.

Several key questions remain unresolved. One is launcher attrition: how many missile launchers have actually been destroyed, and how much of Iran’s mobile launch infrastructure remains intact. Another is dispersal effectiveness. Iran spent decades developing underground facilities, mobile launchers, and distributed storage sites designed to complicate targeting. It remains unclear how effectively these systems were dispersed before the opening strikes.

A third question is doctrinal: how well Iran’s survivability model holds up under persistent surveillance and strike pressure from a technologically superior adversary.

What we are beginning to observe suggests a more complicated picture. Iranian missile launches have continued throughout the conflict, which indicates that the system has not collapsed under leadership decapitation or initial strikes. At the same time, there are indications that the size and frequency of missile salvos have declined over time. The reasons for this remain uncertain. It could reflect the destruction of launchers, the depletion of ready-to-fire missile inventories, logistical disruptions, or a deliberate attempt by Iran to pace its strikes in order to sustain retaliation over a longer conflict.

Drones add another layer to this discussion, and they have often been treated in recent years as a kind of technological equalizer. But the war may ultimately reinforce a more modest conclusion about their role.

Iranian drones have remained useful tools for harassment, reconnaissance, and saturation effects. They are cheaper, easier to deploy, and can force defenders to expend interceptors and maintain constant vigilance. In that sense, drones are valuable components of an attritional strategy.

However, the conflict also suggests that drones do not substitute for ballistic missiles in high-intensity state conflict. Against layered air defenses, drones tend to have relatively high interception rates and limited destructive payloads. Their primary value lies in complicating defense and sustaining pressure rather than delivering decisive battlefield effects.

Taken together, the missile and drone campaigns highlight a broader issue about Iranian military doctrine. Tehran built its strike architecture around the idea that persistence and endurance could compensate for conventional inferiority. The goal was not necessarily to overwhelm an adversary in a single blow but to ensure that Iran could keep firing, keep imposing costs, and keep the conflict politically and economically painful for its opponent.

So far, the war suggests that this logic partially holds. Iran has been able to sustain missile and drone launches despite leadership losses and sustained targeting. But the declining scale of salvos and the heavy reliance on drones also raise questions about the long-term sustainability and operational effectiveness of the system under prolonged attrition.

There are of course many other areas worth examining, and I am sure I will write more about them as the war evolves and, hopefully, as we get clearer answers. I also have a few pieces in the works: some looking at the historical evolution of Iran’s military doctrine, and others focusing on the nuclear dimension and Russia.

It has been a tiring period of analysis, and I really appreciate those who continue to read my work, as well as the many friends and colleagues doing remarkable work on Iran and serving as voices of clarity and wisdom during a very difficult moment.

The opening messaging from the U.S. and Israel made the scale of the campaign clear. In an eight-minute video posted to Truth Social, President Trump outlined the campaign’s objectives in blunt terms: destroy Iran’s missiles, dismantle its missile industry, and eliminate its naval capabilities. Shortly afterward, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a message addressed directly to the Iranian public in Farsi, urging them to “come to the streets, come out in your millions, to finish the job.” Taken together, the statements suggested that the campaign was intended not only to degrade Iran’s military capabilities but also to place pressure on the political system itself.

I have written elsewhere about the shifting U.S. justifications for confrontation with Iran in the months leading up to the war. Rather than revisit those debates, this post tries to answer a simpler question, albeit with incomplete information, what does the targeting itself suggest about the objectives of the campaign?

This is not intended to be a comprehensive catalogue of every strike or claim. Much of the information circulating publicly is fragmentary, and open-source reporting often mixes confirmed strikes with unverified reports. Instead, the goal here is to step back from the noise and look at the broader targeting pattern in order to understand what the operational objectives of the campaign might be.

As with any early assessment of an ongoing war, there are likely gaps and errors in what follows. Some targets remain unconfirmed, some sites may have been misidentified, and additional strikes will almost certainly come to light as satellite imagery and independent reporting catch up with events on the ground. What follows should therefore be read as an attempt to interpret the campaign’s emerging logic rather than a definitive accounting of the war.

So far, the strikes appear to fall into overlapping lines of effort: suppressing Iran’s air defenses, degrading its ballistic missile force, eliminating political and military leadership, and weakening its ability to project power outward. CSIS analysis suggests that the U.S. and Israel appear to have divided labor, with Israel handling leadership decapitation and the US conducting large-scale capability degradation.

Leadership and Governance Targeting

The opening phase of the campaign combined leadership targeting with early suppression of air defenses around Tehran. On the first day of strikes, February 28, one of the earliest confirmed targets was the Office of the Supreme Leader in northern Tehran. Beginning the operation with a strike against the compound associated with Ali Khamenei immediately set the tone for the campaign. Rather than focusing exclusively on military infrastructure in the opening hours, the targeting extended directly into the political center of the Iranian state.

Within the same early period, additional strikes were reported near the Tehran Judicial Palace and at Mehrabad Airport. Mehrabad sits within Tehran’s broader air defense network and hosts military aviation infrastructure tied to Tactical Airbase 11, including radar and missile systems deployed to defend the capital. Striking the airport, therefore, served two purposes at once. It degraded elements of Tehran’s air defense coverage while also signaling that the capital’s core political and military sites were exposed.

Subsequently, the Presidential Office, the Assembly of Experts meeting site, and the Supreme National Security Council building were all struck within a short window. These institutions are clustered in Tehran’s Pasteur district and together form the governing architecture of the Islamic Republic. Other sites linked to the judiciary and the Expediency Discernment Council complex also appeared to have been targeted. Like the June 2025 war, the headquarters of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting was struck and then struck again.

Running alongside the government apparatus targets is a distinct thread of strikes against Iran’s internal coercive apparatus: the institutions the regime relies on to manage domestic unrest. The IRGC Sarallah Operational Base, the primary IRGC security coordination hub in Tehran, was struck. So were the Law Enforcement Command headquarters and the Internal Security Forces Emergency HQ. These are the organizations that suppressed the mass protests of January 2026. The targeting extended to the provinces, with Law Enforcement Command facilities confirmed struck in Kurdistan and Ilam, suggesting an attempt to disrupt internal security coordination across the country at once rather than simply decapitating it in the capital. Their presence in the target set is consistent with the campaign’s declared regime-change objective: degrading the instruments of domestic repression in parallel with the instruments of external military power.

Ballistic Missiles

Iran’s ballistic missile force sits at the center of its military strategy, and that reality is clearly reflected in the targeting pattern so far. Over the past two decades, Tehran has built a large and increasingly diverse missile arsenal that functions as its primary deterrent against Israel and as one of its most reliable tools for projecting power across the region. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force (IRGC-AF) oversees this inventory, which includes medium-range systems capable of reaching Israel, alongside shorter-range missiles for targeting the Persian Gulf. Taken together, this missile force represents Iran’s most credible retaliatory capability and one of the few ways it can impose meaningful costs on adversaries beyond its borders.

Just as important as the missiles themselves is the infrastructure that supports them. Iran’s missile force is deliberately dispersed across a network of underground complexes, hardened storage sites, and mobile launcher garrisons spread across the country. Many of these facilities are embedded in mountainous terrain, particularly along the Zagros range in western Iran, while others are located across the central plateau and the southern provinces along the Persian Gulf. It is designed to ensure survivability and to allow Iran to continue generating launches even after absorbing strikes

.The strike data from the first several days of the campaign suggests that missile infrastructure has been a central priority, which is not at all surprising. Missile-related sites account for a significant share of the confirmed strikes, more than any other category in the known targets. The geographic spread is also striking. Facilities tied to missile operations appear in Lorestan, Kermanshah, Hormozgan, Fars, Esfahan, Yazd, Qom, Markazi, and Tehran provinces.

The first day of strikes already pointed in this direction. Early engagements appear to have focused on facilities that were more accessible while air defenses were still being suppressed. One of the earliest reported strikes targeted the Haji Abad IRGC Missile Base in Hormozgan, which is associated with an underground missile complex used by the IRGC Aerospace Force. Later that same day, sites associated with the Ghadr-series ballistic missiles were reportedly struck in both Qom and Markazi provinces. The Ghadr H-1 ballistic missile site appeared at two separate locations in the strike reporting, consistent with the dispersed basing posture of Iran’s medium-range missile forces.

As the campaign moved into the second and third days, and as Iranian air defenses were degraded, strikes began to reach deeper and harder targets. Several confirmed strikes appeared across the western missile belt along the Zagros mountains. The IRGC AF Imam Ali Underground Missile Base in Lorestan was confirmed struck during this phase, one of Iran’s principal underground missile storage complexes believed to house medium-range systems. In neighboring Kermanshah province, the Bakhtaran (Panj Pelleh) Missile Base also appeared in the strike reporting after earlier explosions were reported in the same area. Another confirmed strike hit the Mahidasht IRGC Drone Base in the same province, indicating that infrastructure tied to Iran’s drone strike capabilities is also part of the broader target set.

Further east towards central Iran, missile facilities around Isfahan and Yazd were also targeted during the following days of the campaign. The Esfahan North Missile Base appeared in the strike reporting and was later struck again, as reflected in a second entry tied to the same location here. The Yazd Missile Base also appears in the strike data. Its inclusion is notable because Yazd lies outside the main western missile belt, suggesting the strike list extends beyond Iran’s primary basing clusters to include reserve dispersal locations.

In southern Iran, missile infrastructure in both Fars and Hormozgan provinces was also targeted. The Shiraz IRGC Ballistic Missile Site and Fars Underground Missile Base appeared in the reporting during the second phase of the campaign, followed shortly by a strike on the Shiraz West Missile Base. Two facilities within the same regional complex being struck within a short period suggests a coordinated effort to degrade the broader Shiraz basing network. Further south, the Khorgu Underground Missile Base in Hormozgan was also confirmed struck, extending the missile campaign into Iran’s southern basing zone.

One of the most strategically significant strikes during these days appears to have targeted production infrastructure rather than storage or launch facilities. The IRGC Al Ghadir Missile Command site linked to the Bidganeh solid-propellant production facility was confirmed struck during this phase. Bidganeh is widely assessed as one of Iran’s primary sites for producing the solid rocket motors used in systems like the Fateh and Zolfaghar missile families. Damage to a facility like this has implications that extend beyond the missiles currently deployed because it directly affects Iran’s ability to regenerate those capabilities in the future.

Another feature of the missile campaign is the apparent re-engagement of certain sites across multiple days. The Haji Abad missile complex appears again in later strike reporting after the initial engagement on the first day. Similarly, the Esfahan North missile base appears more than once in the dataset. This pattern is consistent with campaigns against hardened underground infrastructure.

Naval and Air Force

After the strikes on Iran’s missile infrastructure, the next layer of the campaign appears to focus on the systems that allow Iran to project power outward and defend its airspace. Naval installations, coastal military infrastructure, and tactical air bases appear repeatedly in the strike data.

Iran’s naval posture is built around an asymmetric strategy in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. The IRGC Navy and the conventional Iranian Navy divide responsibilities between them. The IRGC Navy focuses on fast attack craft, coastal missile batteries, drones, and other systems designed to threaten shipping in the shallow waters of the Gulf. The conventional navy operates larger surface vessels and submarines from bases such as Bandar Abbas and, more recently, from the facility at Jask on the Gulf of Oman. These naval forces are also integrated with Iran’s broader missile architecture. Anti-ship missiles, coastal radars, and drone launch infrastructure are often colocated with naval bases, and in some cases share command and logistical infrastructure with the IRGC-AF. As a result, targeting naval facilities can simultaneously degrade maritime denial capabilities and parts of Iran’s missile ecosystem.

Several naval installations and coastal facilities appear in the reporting across the first days of the campaign. One of the most heavily struck locations is the Konarak complex on Iran’s southeastern coast in Sistan and Baluchistan province. The site hosts the 3rd Naval District, Tactical Airbase 10, and nearby IRGC drone storage and launch infrastructure. The 10th Artesh Air Force Fighter Base at Konarak was struck early in the campaign, and subsequent reporting indicates that the naval district itself was hit again later in the operation through confirmed strikes on the same complex here and here. Separate strikes also targeted the drone facilities connected to the base here. Satellite imagery released after the attacks shows significant damage to the site, including an Iranian naval vessel burning at the port facility (imagery here).

Bandar Abbas, Iran’s primary naval hub and home to its submarine fleet and the anti-ship missile batteries covering the Strait of Hormuz, appeared in early strike reporting and was struck again in subsequent days, with additional confirmed hits on the broader headquarters complex. The naval facility at Jask, developed in recent years specifically to allow Iranian naval vessels to deploy outside the Strait of Hormuz and into the wider Arabian Sea, also appears in the strike reporting. Along the northern Gulf, the IRGC's 3rd Imam Hossein regional command in Khuzestan was confirmed struck, along with a Bushehr province naval facility. These are the coastal assets Iran would use to widen the conflict at sea, and their degradation reduces Iran’s ability to threaten regional shipping and energy infrastructure. Trump announced on March 1 that nine Iranian warships had been sunk and Iran's naval headquarters destroyed.

Tactical air bases received parallel attention throughout the campaign. The Iranian air force flies an aging mix of F-14s, F-4s, MiG-29s, and domestically produced Kowsar fighters that could not contest air superiority against a peer adversary. The operational concern is not Iranian offensive airpower per se but the infrastructure these bases represent: radar networks, maintenance facilities, air defense coordination nodes, and in some cases missile storage. To this end, the campaign struck Tactical Airbase 2 near Tabriz in the northwest and again, the 7th Tactical Airbase in Shiraz, the Konarak complex on the southeastern coast, the Mehrabad/Tactical Airbase 11 complex near Tehran, and the Kerman Air Force Base further south.

Nuclear Targets

Compared with the breadth of targeting against missile infrastructure, naval facilities, air bases, and leadership institutions, nuclear-related targets appear only sporadically in the strike data so far. The campaign has clearly touched parts of Iran’s nuclear and defense-industrial ecosystem, but these strikes make up a relatively small portion of the overall target set. Most of the confirmed and reported engagements have instead focused on missile forces, air defenses, military command nodes, and internal security infrastructure. Nuclear facilities appear in the dataset, but they are not the dominant feature of the campaign.

The most clearly documented strike on a nuclear facility is the attack on the Natanz Enrichment Complex. Prior to June 2025, Natanz was the core of Iran’s uranium enrichment program and hosted large underground halls containing centrifuge cascades used to produce enriched uranium. After the Israeli-U.S. strikes in June 2025 damaged portions of the complex, Iran began efforts to restore operations and shift activity toward hardened and underground infrastructure. Western intelligence assessments and IAEA reporting indicated that Tehran was attempting to repair damaged surface infrastructure while also relying more heavily on protected facilities and dispersal of equipment across the enrichment network. In the current campaign, the IAEA confirmed on March 3 that access tunnels and surface entrance infrastructure at Natanz were damaged.

Parchin is the nuclear-adjacent site appearing most frequently in the available data, referenced here, here, and here. The complex southeast of Tehran has long been associated with high-explosive testing and suspected weapons-development experiments that international inspectors have never been able to fully investigate. Its repeated appearance suggests sustained interest from the planner, though open-source reporting has not yet established the extent of the damage.

Two other locations that frequently surfaced in discussions about Iran’s nuclear activities prior to this war do not appear to have been targeted yet (or at least no confirmation). They are Taleghan-2 and the so-called Pickaxe Mountain site.

Taleghan-2 sits inside the Parchin military complex and has been associated with Iran’s earlier nuclear weapons development work under the Amad Plan. The facility reportedly housed a high-explosive test chamber used for experiments relevant to nuclear weapon implosion systems, and it was previously damaged in an Israeli strike in 2024. Satellite imagery since mid-2025 shows Iran rebuilding and then burying the new structure under soil and a concrete shell, likely to protect it from future air attacks. Meanwhile, the Pickaxe Mountain site, located near the Natanz complex, has also drawn attention from analysts who believe Iran may be constructing a deeply buried facility there that could potentially host covert enrichment activity. Satellite imagery following the June 2025 strikes showed continued tunneling and construction activity around the site, raising concerns that Iran may be dispersing parts of its nuclear program into more hardened underground infrastructure. I assume these sites will be targeted in the coming days, let’s see.

What stands out in the overall picture is the disproportion. Missile infrastructure, air defenses, naval forces, air bases, and leadership institutions account for the overwhelming majority of confirmed strikes.

What’s Next

With the caveat that much of the targeting picture is still incomplete, one pattern already stands out: leadership and governance appear to be playing an unusually prominent role in this campaign. That does not mean the operation is primarily about decapitation. Missile infrastructure, air defenses, naval facilities, and air bases dominate the strike data. But compared with past Israeli operations against Iran, the frequency with which political and internal security institutions appear in the target set is striking.

It is also worth remembering how incomplete early wartime information can be. During the June 2025 conflict, it only became clear after the war ended that Israel had targeted a meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. At the time, it barely appeared in open-source reporting. Something similar could easily be happening here. Some of the most consequential strikes may not become fully visible until much later, once satellite imagery, intelligence leaks, and retrospective reporting fill in the gaps.

At the moment, there are more questions than answers. I have found myself messaging other Iran specialists repeatedly over the past few days, asking some version of the same question: “Is X still alive?” The uncertainty itself says something about the nature of the campaign.

As negotiations between the United States and Iran appear deeply stalled, the ballistic arsenal available to Tehran is causing considerable concern in the West. Has it been rebuilt since the last Israeli-American strike campaign in June 2025?

The part of the Iranian arsenal most affected was its medium-range ballistic missiles [covering roughly 1,000 to 2,000 kilometres, which put Israeli territory within range of Tehran]. However, according to most available information, Iran has since been able to produce ballistic missiles at an impressive rate by international standards, and in facilities that were not damaged during the war.

We do not know the exact number, but this has generated concern. The main problem for Tehran remains the availability of its launchers, which are required to fire the missiles. Many were destroyed or damaged in June 2025. And so far, the method Iran has used to repair them has not been very effective.

Are the Iranians once again in a position to launch missiles from the west of the country, the region that gives them the easiest ability to target Israel?

Yes, because Iran has deeply buried and fortified missile silos, and has made efforts to repair those sites [following the strikes]. What is not known, however, is whether the missiles housed in those facilities were damaged and whether they have been able to be retrieved. The same applies to the launchers: Iran had not dispersed them at the outset of the war. It is therefore possible that they are damaged.

What is the current state of Iran’s air defence and anti-missile capabilities, which were also badly hit by the Israeli-American strikes?

A large portion of the S-300 systems [of Russian manufacture], which represent the country’s most advanced air defence capabilities, had their radars damaged or destroyed in the strikes of October 2024 and then those of June 2025. Satellite imagery shows Iran attempting to use domestically produced radars, pairing them with launchers equivalent to the S-300, known as the “Bavar-373” [in service since 2019].

Recently, Tehran also ordered from the Russians small portable air defence systems called “Verba.” These are primarily intended for use against cruise missiles and drones. This reflects a shift in Iranian air defence strategy, with an orientation toward cheaper and faster methods of defending the territory.

That said, the country’s defensive capabilities are not very robust at the moment. The regime knows it will not be able to meaningfully defend itself against American or Israeli fighter aircraft.

Are Russia and China genuinely supporting Iran militarily today, unlike what happened in June 2025?

Before the “twelve-day war,” a large portion of Iranian military technology already came from Russia or China. Russia was not in a position to supply Iran with air defence systems, but it did train Iranians in air defence following the strikes of October 2024.

The Chinese, for their part, have been less visible until now. But it is certain that after the “twelve-day war,” Iran moved quickly to sign contracts with the Russians and the Chinese, including for the acquisition of anti-ship missiles. Russia and China are therefore prepared to defy American warnings regarding the delivery of military systems to Iran. This shows that they have a direct stake in the survival of the regime. Fundamentally, this changes the game for Iran.

Russia and China also appear willing to assist Iran in the space domain, and Mr Trump has accused Iran of now being capable of striking the American continent — what is the reality?

Space technology and space launch vehicles are essential to any long-range intercontinental ballistic missile programme [capable, for example, of targeting the United States], and there has potentially been, recently, Russian support for the Iranian space programme. Since the start of the war in Ukraine [in which Iran provides substantial military support to Russia], Iran has begun to achieve very good results in tests of these launchers, which was not previously the case. I do not think Iran would target the United States, but that is what Mr Trump is alluding to.

What tactical lessons has Iran drawn from the Israeli-American strikes of June 2025?

The country has raised its alert level and its readiness for strikes: greater dispersal of forces and more camouflage in order to ensure command continuity in the event of an attack. The authorities also appear to have accepted that they will not be able to intercept all incoming strikes. The objective is now to better protect strategic sites, notably through deeper underground burial of sensitive infrastructure.

Finally, Tehran has drawn a lesson in deterrence: missile strikes against Israel had, according to the regime, a genuine psychological impact. Even at a conventional disadvantage, the ability to target urban centres constitutes a lever for raising the political cost of escalation, for both Israel and the United States.

What is your assessment of the current state of the Iranian nuclear programme?

Overall, the Iranian nuclear programme has been severely damaged and is no longer functioning in its previous configuration. There is nothing at this stage to indicate that Tehran has decided to restart a clandestine military programme, particularly since such an effort would be difficult to conceal from Western surveillance. Iran has partially rebuilt the Parchin site by burying it more deeply, but without any known sensitive material present. Elsewhere, the focus is primarily on reinforcing and protecting existing facilities.

The main uncertainty concerns the stockpiles of highly enriched uranium stored underground, the exact location of which remains unclear. For now, the nuclear question is more political than military: stockpiles and technical capabilities still exist, but there is no longer a fully operational programme. In the short term, the reconstitution of ballistic capabilities appears more worrying than a rapid restart of the nuclear programme.

Do Tehran’s regional supporters retain any real retaliatory capability in the event of American strikes?

The Houthis remain today the most immediate source of operational support. They have already demonstrated their capabilities by forcing the United States to deploy its interception systems in the Red Sea on a massive scale, contributing to the depletion of its munition stockpiles. The Iraqi militias have a more limited capability, essentially confined to the threat against American bases in Iraq.

Hezbollah represents the major strategic unknown. The movement would be seeking to reconstitute itself. Its absence of meaningful engagement during the “twelve-day war” was probably perceived in Tehran as a failure. The question remains whether, since then, Iran has reinforced its support to restore its capabilities.

I personally think it would be a mistake to address the nuclear issue alone. But if the United States and Iran are serious about addressing the nuclear issue narrowly, rather than folding it into a broader confrontation, then the scope of negotiations is actually quite constrained. At this point, the nuclear file is no longer about preventing the emergence of a fully intact Iranian weapons program. Much of that infrastructure has already been degraded. What remains is a more limited but still consequential set of issues: Iran’s highly enriched uranium (HEU) stockpile and the absence of a complete, verifiable declaration of its nuclear facilities.

The 12-Day War materially changed the nuclear landscape. Israeli and U.S. strikes damaged key elements of Iran’s enrichment enterprise, including centrifuge halls, power supply infrastructure, and supporting facilities associated with enrichment operations. While the full extent of the damage remains contested and cannot be independently verified, the effect was to disrupt Iran’s ability to operate enrichment at scale in the near term. This was not a comprehensive dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear know-how or scientific base, but it did degrade the industrial backbone of the program as it existed before the war.

As a result, the nuclear problem today is less about an active enrichment surge and more about residual risks. The most important of these is the fate of Iran’s existing HEU stockpile, material enriched well beyond civilian requirements and accumulated prior to the strikes. Even with damaged facilities, possession of that material continues to carry proliferation risk, particularly in the absence of international oversight.

This is where the issue becomes squarely an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) problem. The IAEA’s challenge is not simply access, but accounting. Iran has not provided a full or updated declaration of its nuclear facilities, nor has it restored the monitoring arrangements that would allow inspectors to reestablish continuity of knowledge. Without declarations, inspectors cannot confirm what survived the strikes, what was moved, or what may be recoverable. Verification gaps now matter as much as physical damage.

From a negotiating standpoint, this narrows the agenda considerably. Surrendering or transferring the HEU stockpile would directly address the most acute remaining nuclear risk. It would not require Iran to abandon enrichment permanently or accept sweeping restrictions on its scientific capacity. It would simply remove the material that shortens breakout timelines and heightens suspicion at a moment when Iran’s enrichment infrastructure is already degraded.

At the same time, removing HEU alone would not resolve longer-term concerns. Iran retains the technical expertise to reconstitute enrichment over time, including through parallel or covert pathways. That reality underscores why declarations and inspections are inseparable from material disposition. Negotiations therefore hinge less on intent than on sequencing: how HEU is handled, when inspectors return, what facilities are declared, and how monitoring is sustained.

The irony is that, compared to ballistic missiles or Iran’s regional proxy network, the nuclear issue is now arguably the easiest part of the problem to address. The Iranian regime is weaker than it has been in years and appears to be searching for a way out of a deteriorating strategic position. Against that backdrop, giving up HEU and restoring transparency would be a relatively modest concession, far less existential than Tehran often portrays it to be. The fact that even this limited step remains contested says less about the difficulty of the nuclear issue itself than about the political constraints Iran now faces at home and abroad.

In the near term, Russia is likely to keep its deployed strategic forces close to former New START ceilings. Doing so serves several purposes. It sustains Moscow’s long-standing narrative that it is not seeking an arms race, avoids triggering immediate U.S. uploading or force expansion, and remains fiscally sensible under sanctions and wartime strain. Russian planners have long emphasized survivability over aggregate numbers, and New START’s ceilings were never viewed in Moscow as operationally constraining. Maintaining rough continuity in deployed strategic forces allows Russia to project restraint while preserving flexibility.

At the same time, Russia will preserve and quietly expand its upload hedge. This is where New START’s expiration matters most operationally. MIRVed systems such as RS-24 Yars and, eventually, RS-28 Sarmat were deliberately designed with latent warhead capacity. Under treaty constraints, Russia typically deployed fewer reentry vehicles per missile than technically possible. Post-2026, Moscow can incrementally increase loading without fielding new launchers. Importantly, the binding constraint here is not warhead availability. Russia maintains a continuously active warhead production and refurbishment complex. The bottlenecks lie in non-nuclear components: reentry vehicles, penetration aids, post-boost vehicles, guidance electronics, and quality-controlled solid-fuel production. These constraints make a rapid breakout implausible, but they do support gradual, selective uploading over time as a hedge against U.S. or Chinese developments.

Where Russia is most likely to expand is outside the strategic category altogether. Non-strategic nuclear weapons and intermediate-range delivery systems are cheaper to field, draw on existing production lines, and are directly relevant to Russia’s core contingencies in Europe. These forces also sit outside the categories Washington has traditionally prioritized in arms control, allowing Moscow to expand capabilities without formally violating any remaining norms.

Russia will also continue to prioritize survivability and counters to U.S. damage-limitation strategies rather than numerical parity. This includes investments in mobility, hardening, redundancy in command and control, and counterspace capabilities intended to offset U.S. ISR and missile defense. Novel systems such as Avangard, Poseidon, and Burevestnik fit into this logic as asymmetric hedges rather than replacements for the triad. Their operational value is uneven and, in some cases, uncertain. But from Moscow’s perspective, they impose planning costs on the United States and provide insurance against future technological breakthroughs that could erode second-strike survivability. These systems also function as bargaining chips in any future arms control discussions.

Doctrinally, Russia’s post-New START behavior will be reinforced by recent revisions to its nuclear policy, which broaden conditions under which nuclear use is contemplated. These changes reflect perceived vulnerability to conventional precision strike, aerospace attack, and threats to command continuity. They do not signal eagerness to use nuclear weapons, but they do legitimize greater reliance on non-strategic nuclear options and theater-level signaling. Combined with intermediate-range deployments, this doctrinal shift lowers thresholds in ways that are difficult to manage in a crisis.

Diplomatically, Moscow is unlikely to pursue a New START-style successor focused on aggregate warhead limits. Instead, Russia will push for narrower arrangements aimed at constraining specific U.S. capabilities it views as destabilizing, including missile defense, long-range precision strike, and theater-range deployments in Europe. Any arms control proposal will be framed instrumentally, not as a normative commitment to restraint, but as a way to bind U.S. advantages while preserving Russian freedom of action elsewhere.

Finally, China will remain the silent driver of Russian hedging. Publicly, Moscow will continue to downplay Beijing’s role. Privately, China’s expanding arsenal reinforces Russia’s reluctance to accept any framework that locks it into parity with the United States while leaving China unconstrained.

The most likely outcome after New START is not a dramatic arms race but a steady pattern of selective adaptation. Russia will hedge, probe, and shift competition into less transparent domains, increasing ambiguity and complicating control over escalation, even in the absence of large numerical changes.

Early Foundations: The 1990s

The foundations of Russia-Iran cooperation on internal security were laid in the aftermath of the Cold War. During the 1990s, Moscow largely avoided public criticism of Iran’s internal repression, framing unrest as an internal matter and signaling diplomatic tolerance for Tehran’s use of force. This posture mattered. At a time when Iran faced sporadic student and labor protests, Russia’s refusal to condemn crackdowns helped normalize the idea that internal repression was a sovereign prerogative. It also aligned with Iran’s silence over Chechnya, where Tehran avoided criticism of Russia’s brutal counterinsurgency campaign in the 1990s, reinforcing a mutual norm of non-interference that treated mass repression and civilian casualties as legitimate instruments of state sovereignty.

The July 1999 Tehran University protests, which saw Iranian security forces brutally suppress a major student uprising, marked an important moment. While there is no evidence of direct Russian material aid during that episode, Moscow’s sympathetic posture toward Tehran’s government signaled a willingness to look the other way. More importantly, the late 1990s marked the beginning of limited intelligence contacts between Russian and Iranian services. These exchanges were formally framed around counterterrorism, narcotics trafficking, and organized crime. In practice, they laid the conceptual foundation for future cooperation on what both regimes would increasingly define as “internal threats.” Protest movements, student activism, independent media, and diaspora networks gradually came to be folded into the same security category as terrorism and extremism.

These early interactions established three enduring patterns. First, Moscow would not challenge Tehran’s internal repression. Second, security cooperation could be justified through expansive threat definitions. Third, intelligence sharing, even when limited, would serve as the backbone of deeper collaboration later.

2009 Green Movement

The disputed presidential election of June 2009 and the massive Green Movement protests that followed marked a watershed in Russian-Iranian cooperation against internal dissent. As millions of Iranians poured into the streets alleging electoral fraud and demanding President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s resignation, Moscow moved swiftly and decisively to support the regime. The chants of “Death to Russia” that echoed among protesters reflected popular anger at Moscow’s role in supporting the regime’s repression.

Russia became the first government to recognize the disputed election results, a move that provided crucial international legitimacy to a vote that most democratic nations refused to validate. Days after the contested election, the Kremlin hosted Ahmadinejad at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Yekaterinburg, where Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other leaders formally congratulated him on his “re-election” despite ongoing unrest in Iranian cities. The Russian government pointedly refused to criticize the ensuing violence in Iran, with officials declaring: “The Iranian elections are the internal affair of Iran… We welcome the fact that elections took place… and see it as symbolic that [Ahmadinejad] made his first visit to Russia.”

Behind the diplomatic facade, more troubling cooperation was taking shape. Russian and Iranian intelligence services were reportedly in closer contact than ever before. Several unconfirmed reports at the time suggested that Russian advisors provided advice to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and police on crowd control techniques, drawing on Russia’s own experience with dissent.

The Green Movement triggered a period of intense institutional learning within Iran’s security apparatus. Iranian officials later acknowledged that the protests exposed weaknesses in surveillance, intelligence coordination, and information control. In response, Tehran invested heavily in cyber monitoring, communications interception, and crowd-control capabilities. While China played a dominant role in providing internet filtering technologies, Russia’s relevance lay elsewhere. Russian experience with protest policing, intelligence penetration of opposition networks, and electronic warfare informed Iran’s post-2009 reforms. For example, Iran’s electronic jamming of dissident satellite broadcasts (like BBC Persian and VOA) intensified after 2009; while Iran largely developed jamming internally, its broader electronic warfare know-how was later enhanced through Russian collaboration. Crucially, Iran began conceptualizing protests not as spontaneous events but as networks that could be mapped, disrupted, and preempted.

Institutionalizing Repression

The early 2010s marked a decisive transition from informal cooperation to formalized repression infrastructure. The pivotal development was the 2013-2014 Law on Cooperation between Iran’s Ministry of Interior and Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. On paper, the agreement resembles routine law enforcement cooperation. In practice, it created a durable legal framework for transferring the tools and doctrines of domestic repression.

The agreement’s significance lies in how it defines internal threats. It commits both parties to cooperation against crimes including “extremist activity,” “crimes related to information technology,” and threats to public order—categories that, in Iran’s legal system, directly encompass protest activity, online mobilization, and opposition organizing. The most revealing clause states plainly:

“The Parties shall also cooperate in the following areas: maintenance of public order and provision of public security.”

This language is not incidental. In Iran, “public order” and “public security” are the legal justifications most commonly used to suppress demonstrations, arrest activists, and deploy riot police. By explicitly anchoring cooperation in these domains, the agreement normalized repression as a technical policing matter rather than a political act.

The agreement further authorizes cooperation on “logistical support and assistance,” “development of information systems,” and “specialized equipment and technical means.” This phrasing enabled transfers of riot gear, surveillance platforms, communications interception tools, and command-and-control systems. It also allowed for joint development and training—embedding Russian methods within Iranian institutions.

Perhaps most consequentially, the agreement legitimizes preemptive repression. It authorizes information on the “exchange of information regarding crimes in the process of formation and development or already committed, and persons involved in these crimes,” not merely crimes already committed. This formulation aligns perfectly with anticipatory crackdowns: identifying organizers, monitoring networks, and disrupting protests before they materialize.

The agreement also anticipates mass unrest through its treatment of internal emergencies. It calls for the “exchange of information regarding the conduct of programs to maintain order and ensure public security during emergency situations (quarantines, widespread disturbances, and natural disasters).” Here, “widespread disturbances” functions as a catch-all category for large-scale protests, riots, and politically driven unrest. By explicitly incorporating “widespread disturbances” into the scope of cooperation, the agreement normalizes the treatment of protest activity as an emergency public-order problem.

The agreement further specifies that cooperation may be initiated either “on the basis of a request by the interested Party, or on the initiative of the Parties,” and that “in urgent cases, requests may be made orally,” with written confirmation to follow. These provisions for rapid coordination underscore the agreement’s operational focus on real-time crisis responses, exactly the kind of agility needed to suppress emerging protests.

Throughout the 2010s, this institutional framework enabled sustained transfers of equipment and expertise. Russia expanded its role as a supplier of anti-riot and electronic warfare systems to Iran, including crowd-control vehicles, body armor, shields, batons, tear gas, stun grenades, electronic jamming devices, and communications interception tools. In parallel, training programs brought Iranian internal security forces into contact with Russian counterparts from the National Guard and the FSB, with a focus on crowd-control, urban protest management, and counter-mobilization tactics. In practice, the agreement functioned as a conduit through which hardware, operational concepts, and professional networks were systematically transferred and adapted for use against domestic dissent.

2017-2018 Protests

When protests erupted across Iran in late December 2017—initially triggered by economic grievances in Mashhad before spreading rapidly to dozens of cities—Russia moved quickly to shield Tehran diplomatically and legitimize its coercive response. As young Iranians mobilized around unemployment, inflation, and inequality, Iranian officials reverted to a well-established narrative that framed the unrest as foreign-instigated, accusing the United States and Israel of engineering the protests. Russian officials publicly reinforced this framing. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov issued a pointed warning to Washington, cautioning it “against attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Beyond rhetorical alignment, Iranian protest suppression in 2017-18 increasingly reflected Russian-style approaches to information control and crowd management. Iranian authorities imposed rolling restrictions on Telegram and mobile networks, an approach that closely paralleled Russia’s contemporaneous efforts to regulate Telegram and assert state authority over the digital space. By this period, Iran’s internal security apparatus had been strengthened through the expansion of its cyber police (FATA, established in 2011) and through upgraded filtering and surveillance systems—organizationally and doctrinally similar to Russian cyber-policing models. During the broader 2017-2019 protest cycle, Iranian forces deployed truck-mounted water cannons, armored tactical vehicles, and increasingly sophisticated radio jammers, reflecting tactics long used by Russian riot-control units.

Iran’s internet censorship regime also evolved in ways that echoed Russian practice. During the 2017-18 protests, authorities blocked millions of websites, deepened filtering to counter VPN circumvention, and critically implemented targeted, localized internet shutdowns rather than an immediate nationwide blackout. This calibrated approach closely resembled Russia’s emphasis on selective disruption, allowing the state to suppress mobilization while avoiding the escalation risks associated with total information blackouts. While much of the underlying infrastructure was developed domestically or with Chinese assistance, Russian influence was evident in Tehran’s adoption of “information sovereignty” rhetoric and its push to localize internet traffic—directly mirroring Russia’s own legal and regulatory framework for sovereign internet control. Notably, these partial shutdowns foreshadowed (but did not yet replicate) the nationwide blackout imposed in 2019.

Russian state media reinforced this alignment at the narrative level. RT and Sputnik advanced claims that British intelligence services had fomented the unrest, citing remarks by a convicted hacker who accused GCHQ of infiltrating activist networks to conduct disinformation operations. This strategy closely followed Moscow’s standard playbook for delegitimizing protests—casting them as externally orchestrated “color revolution” efforts rather than expressions of domestic grievance. Iranian officials and state media echoed these narratives almost verbatim, blaming foreign “instigators” and CIA plots, reinforcing a storyline that Russian officials actively promoted.

High-level security coordination underscored that this convergence was not coincidental. Russia’s former Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and former head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani held frequent consultations during periods of unrest. Patrushev, in particular, developed a clear pattern of engaging Iranian counterparts amid protest waves. In subsequent meetings, the two sides explicitly discussed “measures to combat Western interference in [their] internal affairs.”

2019 Protests

The November 2019 protests, triggered by a sudden fuel price hike, marked one of the deadliest episodes of repression in Iran’s modern history. Over the course of several days, Iranian security forces killed at least several hundred protesters, with some estimates exceeding 1,500. Russia’s role during this crisis was less visible but more consequential, spanning infrastructure control, riot-control capability, and intelligence coordination.

Within 24 hours of the unrest, Iran imposed a near-total nationwide internet blackout that lasted roughly ten days. This unprecedented move closely resembled Russian and post-Soviet “kill-switch” models for suppressing mass mobilization by severing horizontal communication among protesters while preventing external scrutiny. Iran’s ability to execute a nationwide shutdown while preserving limited domestic connectivity pointed to major advances in centralized control, capabilities likely informed by Russian and Chinese technical expertise. Although Tehran had tested elements of its “national intranet” before 2019, the fuel protests demonstrated a new level of operational maturity consistent with Russian-style sovereign internet concepts.

Reports also persisted of Russian-origin riot-control equipment and vehicles being deployed. By 2019, Iran’s riot police had acquired armored vehicles such as Rateq platforms and other crowd-control trucks. While Iran produces some domestic systems, it has also imported or jointly produced equipment with close partners.

Most critically, intelligence coordination deepened. As protests unfolded, Iran’s security services likely benefited from Russian intelligence inputs, including monitoring of diaspora activists and Persian-language networks abroad—an area where Russian intelligence has extensive experience. Reporting from this period suggests that Moscow and Tehran intensified intelligence sharing related specifically to countering domestic unrest. A later disclosure by Iranian Major General Mostafa Izadi was particularly revealing: he stated that Russian intelligence had provided advance warnings of impending protests, enabling Iranian forces to pre-position units and prepare repression measures before unrest fully materialized.

Formalizing Digital Repression

By the early 2020s, Russia-Iran cooperation on internal security had moved beyond informal coordination and episodic assistance. The information security agreement signed in Moscow on January 26, 2021, and later approved by Iran’s parliament in 2023, marked a shift toward codifying shared practices for controlling the digital domain. Publicly framed as a cybersecurity framework, the agreement instead reflects a convergence around a common understanding of information space as an arena of internal security and regime protection.

The language of the agreement is explicit in how it conceptualizes dissent. It identifies concern over the use of digital technologies “to destabilize the internal political and socio-economic situation,” placing protest mobilization, political organizing, and online opposition in the same threat category as foreign interference. This framing closely mirrors Russian information-security doctrine, which treats internal dissent not as a political phenomenon but as a vector of subversion.

Rather than narrowly defining threats, the agreement adopts an expansive conception of harmful activity in the information space. It characterizes the use of information and communication technologies “to interfere in the internal affairs of states,” “violate public order,” or “destabilize the internal political and socio-economic situation and interfere in public administration” as security threats. It further identifies as threatening the dissemination of information that causes harm to the “socio-political and socio-economic systems” or to the “spiritual, moral, and cultural environment.” The effect of this language is to collapse protected political expression and genuine security risks into a single category, granting both states broad discretion to criminalize online activism, protest coordination, and sustained criticism of government policy.

The agreement also establishes mechanisms for operational cooperation. It commits both sides to “exchange information and cooperate in the law enforcement sphere to prevent, detect, suppress, and investigate crimes involving the use of information and communication technologies.” Given the breadth of the threat definitions, this effectively authorizes intelligence sharing on political dissidents, joint monitoring of online spaces, and coordination in prosecutions related to digital activism and protest organization. The agreement further commits the parties to “providing assistance…in the transfer of information technologies and knowledge, capacity building and professional training”—language consistent with the diffusion of surveillance tools, monitoring techniques, and institutional practices for policing the information environment.

Taken together, the agreement does not introduce a new direction in Russia-Iran relations so much as formalize an existing trajectory. It embeds into law a shared conception of digital repression that had already been tested during earlier protest waves, and it positions information control as a core pillar of counter-unrest strategy. In doing so, it laid the institutional groundwork for the more explicit and operational cooperation that would emerge during the nationwide protests that followed.

Mahsa Amini Protests

The nationwide protests that erupted in September 2022 following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in morality police custody constituted the most serious challenge to the Islamic Republic in decades. Demonstrations spread rapidly across all provinces and persisted for months, with protesters openly calling for the end of the regime. Tehran’s response was comprehensive and violent. Russia’s role during this period was correspondingly more explicit and operational than in previous protest cycles, reflecting the maturation of a security partnership between two increasingly isolated authoritarian states.

U.S. intelligence publicly revealed in the fall of 2022 that Russia was actively advising Iran on how to suppress the demonstrations. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stated that “Russia may be advising Tehran on how to manage the protests,” while National Security Council spokesman John Kirby emphasized that this was “not an allegation but a fact.” Moscow, he noted, was drawing on its “extensive experience” suppressing dissent to advise Tehran on “optimal methods” of crackdown. Subsequent disclosures indicated that this support went beyond general consultation.

Leaked Iranian government documents obtained and released by the hacker group Black Reward showed that Tehran had explicitly requested Russian assistance as the protests intensified. According to these files, Iranian authorities asked Moscow to dispatch security advisors and provide anti-riot equipment and training in preparation for a “long-term confrontation” with protesters. The documents also described Russian signals intelligence activity targeting Western communications, intended to provide Tehran with insight into the protest movement’s organization, leadership, and relative strength.

In response, Russia reportedly began supplying Iran with additional anti-riot equipment in late 2022. Iran International reported that Tehran specifically requested “anti-riot equipment and training” from Moscow as it faced shortages during the prolonged unrest. This assistance likely included helmets, shields, tear gas canisters, stun grenades, and possibly additional armored crowd-control vehicles. Observers noted that Iranian riot police appeared with newer gear as the crackdown continued, consistent with replenishment during the protest period.

Russian support extended into the digital domain. During the protests, the Wall Street Journal reported that Moscow was directly assisting Iran through the provision of surveillance tools, hacking software, and exploitation techniques targeting common consumer technologies. Specific transfers later came to light involving software from the Russian firm PROTEI, which maintains close ties to the Russian Defense Ministry. PROTEI supplied censorship and interception software to Iranian mobile service providers such as Ariantel. According to the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, these tools enabled Iranian authorities to “directly monitor, intercept, redirect, degrade, or deny all Iranians’ mobile communications, including those who are presently challenging the regime.”

At the diplomatic level, Moscow continued to provide protective cover. When Western governments pushed a resolution at the UN Human Rights Council in late 2022 to establish a fact-finding mission into Iran’s protest-related abuses, Russia voted against it. When Iran was expelled from the UN Commission on the Status of Women in December 2022 over its repression of women and girls during the protests, Russia was one of only eight countries to oppose the move.

The depth of Russian support was underscored in November 2022, at the height of the crackdown, when Nikolai Patrushev made another high-profile visit to Tehran. Patrushev met with both President Ebrahim Raisi and Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani for talks explicitly focused on “cooperation in the field of law enforcement, including public security and the fight against terrorism and extremism.” His trip was preceded by a Russian interdepartmental delegation led by his deputy, Oleg Khramov, which focused specifically on cooperation in information security and digital technologies—the very capabilities being deployed against Iranian protesters.

Codifying the Strategic Partnership

The cumulative result of three decades of cooperation was formalized on January 17, 2025, when Russia and Iran signed a comprehensive 20-year strategic partnership treaty in Moscow. The agreement codified the security collaboration that had long underpinned Iran’s ability to suppress domestic dissent, embedding it within a binding international framework and signaling its durability.

The treaty explicitly formalizes intelligence cooperation against internal threats. It commits the intelligence and security services of both states to “exchange information and experience” and to “increase the level of their cooperation” in order to strengthen national security and counter common threats. This language institutionalizes the intelligence sharing on protest movements, opposition networks, and perceived internal destabilization that had already proven central to Iran’s repression strategies.

The treaty further commits both sides to cooperation in “maintaining interaction on issues of protection of public order and ensuring public security, protection of important state facilities,” alongside counterterrorism and extremism. As in earlier agreements, “public order” and “public security” serve as legal catch-all categories that encompass protest suppression and crowd control, providing ongoing justification for coordinated repression.

Information security cooperation is elevated to the treaty level. The agreement commits both parties to political and practical cooperation in international information security in line with the 2021 information security agreement, including expanded cooperation in countering the use of information and communication technologies for criminal purposes and facilitating “strengthening national sovereignty in the international information space.” It further commits both states to regulate international technology companies, exchange experience in managing national segments of the internet, and develop information and communication infrastructure—an explicit endorsement of shared internet control, filtering, and surveillance practices.

Media cooperation is similarly codified. The treaty commits the parties to “jointly countering disinformation and negative propaganda” and to countering the dissemination of “unreliable socially significant information” deemed to threaten national security. In practice, this language targets independent media, diaspora outlets, and investigative reporting on protests and human rights abuses, recasting such coverage as a security threat.

Forward to the Present

Over more than three decades, Russia has played a central role in enabling the Islamic Republic to withstand repeated waves of domestic unrest. This support has extended well beyond episodic diplomatic cover or symbolic political alignment. Instead, it has taken the form of sustained, multi-layered cooperation: the provision of riot-control hardware and crowd-management equipment; the transfer of surveillance technologies and cyber capabilities; training and advisory support for internal security forces; intelligence sharing focused on protest movements and opposition networks; and consistent diplomatic shielding that limits international accountability.

Iran now confronts a new phase of internal instability, marked by deeper societal polarization, greater organizational sophistication among protesters, and heightened international scrutiny. The question is no longer whether Russia will support Tehran, but how that support is evolving. The next post examines Russia’s role in the current protest wave, with particular attention to the specific technologies, advisory mechanisms, and operational practices that are being deployed as Iran’s internal security apparatus adapts to its most serious challenge yet.

The 12-Day War: A Test of Fire

The June 2025 Iran-Israel conflict represented the largest operational deployment of Iran’s missile forces in history. Over twelve intense days, Iran launched approximately 500-600 ballistic missiles, successfully striking roughly 30 targets across Israeli territory. The scale and intensity of the barrage tested both Iran’s industrial capacity and Israel’s defensive capabilities in ways no previous confrontation had. By Israeli estimates, these operations destroyed approximately one-third of Iran’s pre-war ballistic missile stockpiles and launchers. Israeli intelligence assessed that Iran’s operational launcher count plummeted from roughly 300-350 units to approximately 100 by mid-conflict, severely curtailing Tehran’s ability to sustain the high-volume fire that characterized the war’s opening days (see the great work by Decker Eveleth and Fabian Hinz on the strikes).

Yet despite this apparent success, the conflict failed to produce the decisive, lasting degradation that Israeli military planners had anticipated.

Within weeks of the ceasefire, Iranian authorities launched extensive cleanup and repair operations at heavily damaged sites. By late 2025, commercial satellite imagery documented active reconstruction at numerous targeted locations, often featuring redesigned structures incorporating additional hardening measures such as reinforced concrete, earth berms, and dispersed layouts intended to reduce vulnerability to future strikes.

The speed and comprehensiveness of this recovery effort have become a central preoccupation for Israeli and Western intelligence agencies. Rather than the months or years of reconstruction time that planners had hoped the strikes would impose, Iran demonstrated an ability to begin meaningful restoration within weeks and achieve partial operational capability within months.

A Bet on Missiles

Since the conclusion of the 12-day war, the Islamic Republic has embarked on what can only be described as a concerted campaign to reconstitute and dramatically expand its ballistic missile capabilities.

The war appears to have validated, from Iran’s perspective, the value of missile-centric deterrence despite early challenges with command and control coordination and the significant losses inflicted by Israeli counterstrikes. Iranian missiles offered some retaliatory capability, successfully penetrating some Israeli defenses (see Sam Lair’s excellent work on this).

Beyond physical damage, Iranian decision-makers likely place particular weight on the psychological effects of sustained missile fire, including the disruption of daily life, prolonged civil defense alerts, and the demonstration that even advanced defensive systems cannot fully insulate the Israeli population from persistent attack. In Iranian strategic thinking, this psychological pressure is a central component of deterrence by punishment, amplifying the impact of missile strikes even when their material effects are limited. This stands in stark contrast to Iran’s decades-long reliance on its nuclear program as a form of non-weaponized deterrence, an approach that ultimately proved hollow when Tehran needed credible tools to impose costs on adversaries.

Brigadier General Abolfazl Shekarchi, senior spokesperson for the Armed Forces General Staff, captured this sentiment in recent remarks: “Iran’s missiles, manufactured by our elite, penetrated all of the occupation’s expensive air defense systems and destroyed vital targets in Israel.” He further claimed that “After the war, Iran has become stronger than before. Armament production lines are active, such that even after the 12-day imposed war, our powerful missile production line hasn’t stopped for a moment.”

Iran’s evolving missile strategy represents more than a simple restoration of pre-war capabilities but a broader shift from purely retaliatory deterrence toward genuine pre-emptive warfighting potential. The emphasis on mass-producing mobile medium- and short-range ballistic missiles, combined with future investments in enhanced survivability infrastructure, points to a focus on saturation and volume.

The underlying operational concept is straightforward: overwhelm enemy defensive systems with sheer volume of incoming missiles, forcing opponents to confront impossible dilemmas about resource allocation, target prioritization, and defensive positioning. By producing missiles in sufficient quantities, it seems that Iran aims to ensure that even highly effective defenses will be mathematically overwhelmed in sustained conflict.

Politically, this massive expansion underscores Tehran’s choice to rely primarily on conventional missile-based deterrence due to the demonstrated hollowness of relying on nuclear latency. Within Iran’s complex factional politics, conservative military elements and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders have successfully advocated for dramatically increased budgetary allocations toward missile forces. These hard-liners have capitalized on post-war nationalist sentiment to marginalize more moderate voices that traditionally emphasized diplomatic engagement and nuclear negotiations over conventional military buildups.

The result is a more Iranian deterrent posture, one less dependent on ambiguous nuclear threshold threats and more anchored in punishment, including the demonstrated capacity to inflict tangible damage on adversaries through conventional means.

Industrial Resilience: The Architecture of Endurance

Iran’s ability to sustain a twelve-day, high-intensity missile campaign against Israel—and then pivot almost immediately toward comprehensive rebuilding—offers an unusually revealing window into the structural characteristics of its missile industrial base. The war imposed genuine costs on Iran’s production infrastructure, logistics networks, and operational basing practices, but critically, it did not break the overall system.

Before the conflict, Iran’s missile production and storage network was deliberately distributed across multiple geographic nodes. Key production clusters surrounded Tehran, including the Parchin and Khojir facilities, while additional capacity extended into Isfahan province and included underground complexes in western Iran. Israeli strikes targeted this network systematically and with considerable effect. Dozens of sites were reportedly struck—assembly workshops, solid-fuel production laboratories, liquid propellant storage depots, and mobile launcher garages—and Israeli officials subsequently claimed that as many as fifty critical nodes directly tied to Iran’s ballistic missile program sustained damage.

Within mere weeks of the ceasefire, Iranian authorities initiated extensive cleanup operations at heavily damaged sites. Satellite imagery analysis from late 2025 documented reconstruction underway at numerous locations, often featuring enhanced protective measures: thicker concrete walls, additional earth berms, more dispersed layouts, and in some cases entirely new underground components. Moreover, Iranian missile industry appears to maintain spare critical equipment, alternative production facilities, and a degree of geographic redistribution for manufacturing.

The Casting Bottleneck

Recent excellent open-source research by Carl Parkin at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) provides one of the clearest publicly available assessments of what actually constrains Iran’s solid-fuel missile production: industrial throughput at the motor casting stage. This analysis addresses a fundamental question about Iran’s future missile trajectory, specifically, how many solid rocket motors Iran can physically cast and cure each month based on observable infrastructure and known technical constraints. This matters because solid-fuel motors are the pacing item for Iran’s most survivable and militarily relevant missile systems.

The CNS work focuses on three known Iranian SRM production sites: Khojir, Parchin, and Shahroud. Using satellite imagery, Parkin identifies and counts large fixed casting infrastructure (described as concrete “chutes” or casting pits) used to pour and cure composite solid propellant. Because curing takes days and cannot be easily accelerated without risking motor failure, the number of parallel casting positions provides a hard ceiling on monthly output. In other words, if you can count the pits, you can bound production.

The most consequential finding concerns Shahroud, where Iran appears to be bringing online a new solid-fuel production line that began construction in 2024. This expansion helps explain why estimates of Iranian missile production vary so widely. Some figures reflect current realized output, while others implicitly assume future capacity once Shahroud is fully operational. When Shahroud is included, Iran’s theoretical maximum solid rocket motor output rises sharply, approaching the higher-end estimates sometimes cited by Israeli officials. Without it, production looks far more modest. Parkin’s estimates, aggregating the likely throughput across Khojir, Parchin, and Shahroud, suggest Iran could possibly manufacture on the order of 217–240 medium-range solid-fuel missile motors per month under optimal conditions.

This framing also clarifies why recent Israeli strikes reportedly focused on propellant mixing infrastructure, such as planetary mixers, rather than simply destroying launchers or storage bunkers. If mixers or casting halls are degraded, Iran’s ability to regenerate its missile force slows dramatically, even if much of the missile inventory survives. At the same time, the CNS analysis underscores a sobering point: industrial missile capacity is rebuildable. Facilities like Shahroud suggest Iran is planning not just to recover, but to scale. Counting casting pits may sound mundane, but it turns out to be one of the most revealing ways to think about where Iran’s missile program is headed next.

Foreign Dependencies and Maritime Interdiction

Despite efforts toward self-sufficiency, Iran’s missile program retains critical dependencies on foreign-sourced materials, particularly for solid-fuel propellant production. Chief among these is ammonium perchlorate, the oxidizer that comprises 60-70% of most modern solid rocket propellants by weight. Iran does not produce this chemical domestically at a sufficient scale or consistently high quality and has historically relied on imports, especially from Chinese chemical suppliers operating through complex procurement networks.

In the immediate aftermath of the June war, Western intelligence agencies reported renewed Iranian efforts to replenish depleted stocks of ammonium perchlorate and other specialized chemicals. At least one clandestine shipment from China was intercepted by U.S. naval forces conducting maritime interdiction operations in international waters. The seizure reportedly included multiple tons of ammonium perchlorate concealed among legitimate cargo aboard a commercial vessel.

Recognizing this vulnerability, Iran has made determined efforts to expand domestic production capacity. For example, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-affiliated chemical facilities like that in Shiraz could expand their production of ammonium perchlorate, potentially drawing on legacy, less efficient manufacturing processes that tend to produce lower-purity material. While domestically produced oxidizer may suffice for some missile applications, achieving the performance characteristics of Iran’s most advanced systems likely still requires higher-quality imported materials.

Liquid-fuel missiles present fewer immediate supply chain challenges since Iran produces the necessary propellants (unsymmetric dimethylhydrazine and various kerosene formulations) domestically in adequate quantities. However, sanctions regimes and wartime damage to chemical infrastructure still risk constraining access to other specialized components, particularly advanced guidance electronics, high-precision machining tools, and certain specialty alloys used in rocket nozzles and thrust vector control systems.

Basing, Mobility, and the Survivability Challenge

Missile basing infrastructure and mobile launcher survivability emerged as critical vulnerabilities during the 12-day war. Iran entered the conflict with a mixed basing posture that included both fixed launch sites—possibly including hardened shelters and suspected silo-like facilities—alongside road-mobile transporter-erector-launchers (TELs) that in principle offered greater survivability through mobility.

Israeli intelligence, supported by extensive U.S. surveillance assets, quickly identified and degraded this infrastructure. Known static launch locations were struck in the war’s opening hours with precision-guided bunker-busting munitions. Suspected silo facilities, military bases known to host mobile launcher units, and fuel storage depots were systematically targeted. As fixed infrastructure was destroyed, Iran increasingly relied on improvised, ad hoc launch positions—highway stretches, desert clearings, agricultural fields, and temporary sites established specifically for individual launch operations.

Moving large transporter-erector-launchers under constant surveillance from reconnaissance satellites, high-altitude drones, and airborne radar systems proved extraordinarily difficult. Transporter-erector-launcher survivability will likely improve through more extensive use of sophisticated decoys—both inflatable physical decoys and thermal signature generators—designed to complicate satellite-based targeting and force adversaries to expend limited precision weapons against false targets. More controversially, from an international humanitarian law perspective, Iran may experiment with launching operations from urban or semi-urban areas, deliberately positioning military assets near civilian populations to complicate Israeli targeting decisions and deter strikes, despite the obvious risks this poses to non-combatants.

Iran’s targeting strategy during the war likely involved deliberately expending older missile systems first while preserving newer, more capable systems as a hedge against prolonged conflict. Surviving stockpiles were almost certainly subjected to comprehensive post-war inspection and refurbishment programs to identify any maintenance issues, replace aging components, and ensure readiness for potential future employment.

A documentary released in October provided additional insight into the condition of Iran’s mobile launcher force after the war. The footage, filmed inside one of the IRGC’s underground missile bases, showed a mix of repaired and newly delivered transporter-erector-launchers for medium-range ballistic missiles. Systems on display included liquid-fueled Ghadr and Emad missiles alongside solid-fueled Khaybar Shekan variants, including the Fattah-1. At least one launcher appeared to retain visible shrapnel damage, consistent with combat damage sustained during the conflict. The documentary also highlighted continued reliance on older vertical-launch trailers for liquid-fueled missiles, contrasted with newer angled-launch platforms used for solid-fuel systems. Taken together, the imagery suggests that some launchers damaged or disabled during the 12-day war have been returned to service, but that large-scale refurbishment or replacement of the mobile launcher fleet may still be incomplete.

The post-war period has likely prompted a reassessment of Iranian missile basing and survivability concepts. Although some elements of Iran’s missile force survived despite being targeted early in the conflict, reinforcing Tehran’s belief in the value of deeply buried and dispersed infrastructure, Israeli operations exposed important limitations in this approach. Strikes on tunnel entrances at missile bases across western Iran effectively sidelined units that remained protected underground, rendering them unusable for much of the war. Even where internal tunnel networks survived, missile units would have struggled to emerge and maneuver into firing positions under persistent surveillance from Israeli long-range drones and other intelligence assets.

These mixed lessons are likely to drive further adaptation of Iran’s underground missile basing strategy. Iran already maintains a network of underground “missile cities,” consisting of extensive tunnel complexes carved into mountainous terrain, particularly along the Persian Gulf coast and in the Zagros Mountains. Future development is likely to prioritize greater depth, redundancy, and alternative egress options. This could include genuinely deep underground silos capable of withstanding all but the most powerful bunker-penetrating munitions, as well as rail- or tunnel-based mobile systems designed to allow brief exposure for launch followed by rapid reentry into protected space.

Geographic dispersal is also likely to assume greater importance in Iranian operational doctrine. During the June war, the concentration of launch activity in western Iran reduced missile flight times but imposed significant operational costs by creating predictable spatial patterns that Israeli intelligence could exploit. In future contingencies, Iran may shift some launch activity deeper into its interior, including eastern provinces near the Afghan and Pakistani borders, accepting longer flight times in exchange for complicating adversary surveillance, targeting, and strike planning.

Stockpiling, Reserves, and Wartime Endurance

Missile stockpiling strategy and the management of reserves proved to be another critical dimension of operational endurance during the conflict. Before the June war, Iran was estimated by various intelligence agencies to possess somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 missiles of various types and ranges, a substantial arsenal by any measure.

Firing approximately 600 missiles over twelve days, while simultaneously losing additional missiles and launchers to Israeli strikes, certainly drew down this inventory. However, the expenditure did not exhaust Iran’s missile forces, nor did it leave Tehran unable to continue operations had the conflict extended beyond two weeks. Not all of Iran’s pre-war inventory was immediately accessible or positioned for rapid use. Intelligence assessments suggest Iran maintained substantial portions of its missile force in deep storage—reserve stocks held in hardened facilities or remote locations, deliberately kept back from forward deployment to preserve a credible residual deterrent even after significant wartime losses.

Looking forward, Iran will likely formalize and expand such “reserve conversion” pathways and procedures while aiming to maintain substantially larger war reserve stocks, potentially sufficient to sustain a month or more of high-intensity operations rather than the roughly two-week capability demonstrated in June. This emphasis on deeper magazines fundamentally changes the character of Iran’s missile deterrent from a capability designed primarily for brief, intense retaliatory salvos toward something approaching sustained warfighting capacity.

The Path Forward

Had the June war extended significantly beyond its twelve-day duration, Iran would likely have faced increasingly serious operational strain. Launch rates would have continued declining as launcher attrition mounted and available missiles in forward positions dwindled. Production capacity, while resilient, could not replace losses at anything approaching real-time rates. Reserves would have eventually required commitment, progressively depleting the very capabilities Tehran sought to preserve as ultimate guarantors of regime survival.

Yet the conflict ended before these constraints became truly binding, and the lesson drawn in Tehran appears decidedly not to be one of restraint or accommodation. Instead, the dominant interpretation within Iranian military and political circles seems to be that the war validated missile-centric deterrence while simultaneously revealing specific areas requiring improvement: larger peacetime stockpiles, deeper and more geographically dispersed reserves, enhanced production capacity to enable faster regeneration of depleted forces, more survivable basing infrastructure, and a missile force even better adapted to fighting, surviving, and rapidly rebuilding under sustained combat pressure.

Taken together, these dynamics suggest that Israel is unlikely to accept Iran’s post-war missile rebuilding as a fait accompli. Instead, Israeli decision-makers are likely to continue pressing for preemptive or preventive options aimed at degrading Iran’s missile production, storage, and launch infrastructure before expanded capacities fully come online. Given Iran’s demonstrated ability to regenerate missile forces within months rather than years, such strikes may offer only temporary disruption rather than lasting denial. The result could be a recurring cycle in which Israeli efforts to roll back Iran’s missile capabilities are followed by rapid Iranian reconstruction, raising the prospect that large-scale strikes against missile infrastructure become a periodic feature of the regional security environment rather than an exceptional event.

One of the most infamous episodes from his tenure is the moment he came remarkably close to giving Iran a gas centrifuge plant.

Today, that story barely registers as shocking. Iran eventually acquired centrifuges through the A.Q. Khan network and indigenized the technology. And, as my article with Ori Rabinowitz argued, Russia likely has developed a far greater willingness in recent years to transfer militarily relevant nuclear-adjacent technologies to Iran. This was subsequently corroborated in remarkable depth by the Financial Times in August. But in the early-to-mid 1990s, Russian technology transfer to Iran typically occurred at the sub-state level or individual level. And it was hardly non-controversial due to the state of U.S.-Russia relations and limits Moscow placed on its ties to Tehran.

The Bushehr Context

In the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War, Tehran sought rapidly to revive what remained of its civilian nuclear infrastructure. The most visible symbol of this was the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant on the Persian Gulf coast. Constructed initially by Siemens/KWU in the 1970s, the project was abandoned after the 1979 revolution and then subjected to multiple targeted Iraqi airstrikes during the 1980-1988 war, leaving the reactor buildings gutted and much of the German-installed equipment unusable.

By the early 1990s, Iran was determined to bring Bushehr back online both for energy generation and as a political demonstration of nuclear self-sufficiency. Yet Siemens refused to return, no Western supplier was willing to engage under U.S. pressure, and the global export-control environment had tightened considerably. That left only one viable partner with the reactor technology, industrial capacity, and political incentive to take on the project: post-Soviet Russia.

For Moscow, Bushehr was a lifeline: MinAtom needed hard currency, its design bureaus were struggling to keep talent, and the government lacked the capacity to manage the sprawling nuclear enterprise. Mikhailov aggressively pursued foreign contracts, partly to stabilize MinAtom and partly to enhance his own political standing.

In August 1992, Moscow and Tehran signed their first post-Cold War cooperation agreement—already controversial in Washington. That culminated on January 8, 1995, when Mikhailov and Iran’s AEOI chief, Reza Amrollahi, signed the now-public Bushehr-1 contract: Russia would complete the 1000 MWe VVER-1000 unit, provide fuel, and train Iranian personnel.

But another document was signed that day, completely without Yeltsin’s knowledge.

The Secret Protocol

The January 1995 meetings produced a second text: a classified protocol outlining a set of far more sensitive, fuel-cycle-adjacent projects. The scope of these commitments went well beyond anything justifiable under Iran’s “civilian energy” narrative, especially when viewed alongside what we know about the Amad Plan.

According to the protocol (later leaked), Russia agreed to:

• transfer a 30-50 MWt light-water research reactor

• provide 2,000 metric tons of natural uranium

• train Iranian nuclear engineers and scientists

• cooperate on small research and training reactors

• and, most consequentially, assist Iran in constructing a gas centrifuge uranium enrichment facility

Technically, this was an extraordinary offer. Russian centrifuge technology in the mid-1990s was significantly more advanced than anything available through clandestine procurement networks. Unlike the crude maraging-steel rotors of the A.Q. Khan P-1 design, Russian centrifuges operated using composite materials, high-precision bearings, advanced frequency converters, and optimized cascade architectures that enabled high separative work capacity per machine. A Russian-built enrichment facility would not have resembled a Pakistani-style pilot plant; it would have been a fully engineered industrial complex, complete with rotor assemblies, vacuum systems, cascade control units, UF6 handling infrastructure, and the embedded operational know-how required to run and replicate the technology.

The protocol does not promise an immediate centrifuge sale. Instead, it had a phased approach:

1. Within six months, Russian entities would build a “uranium vault” or mine shaft in Iran

2. After that, the two sides would conduct negotiations on signing a contract for the construction of a centrifuge plant for the enrichment of uranium

This staged process was designed to give Moscow plausible deniability while laying technical and geological groundwork for fuel-cycle cooperation. The phrase “uranium vault” almost certainly refers to preparatory work at Saghand (Yazd), where Iran would eventually develop its first domestic uranium mine. Later reporting confirmed that MinAtom had indeed drawn up plans for a 100-200 ton/year mine.

U.S.-Russia Dynamics

By most accounts, including conversations I have had with former U.S. officials, Washington learned of the secret protocol before President Yeltsin did. In Russia, the scheme remained compartmentalized inside MinAtom until April 12, 1995, when Alexei Yablokov, Yeltsin’s environmental adviser and one of the few senior figures willing to challenge MinAtom’s secrecy, published an exposé in Izvestia detailing the centrifuge offer and the broader fuel-cycle commitments. The Russian foreign ministry responded by claiming that Mikhailov’s proposal was only a “statement of intent” that still required higher-level approval. MinAtom denied that negotiations had occurred at all. Both statements were inaccurate.

For the Clinton administration, which was already uneasy about the Bushehr reactor project, the centrifuge revelation was explosive. Senior U.S. officials warned that transferring a turnkey enrichment facility would give Iran the operational knowledge and separative capacity required to produce weapons-grade material. The White House made clear that the issue was serious enough to jeopardize the upcoming May 1995 Clinton-Yeltsin summit. The summit eventually happened, but Iran was high on the agenda.

The controversy around Mikhailov’s secret agreement with Iran (both within Russia and the U.S) arose not only from the technical sensitivity of the transfer but also from the broader political context of 1995. At the time, Moscow still sought integration into Western political and economic institutions. It relied heavily on U.S. and IMF financial assistance, participated in cooperative threat-reduction programs, and was trying to demonstrate compliance with international export-control regimes. A formal commitment to supply Iran with enrichment technology threatened all of these priorities. Even within the Russian government, the foreign ministry judged the centrifuge proposal to be strategically reckless.

A Very Different Russia–Iran Relationship Today

Three decades later, Moscow no longer seeks Western approval; its relationship with Tehran has deepened into a mutually reinforcing security partnership driven by sanctions, wartime interdependence, and shared opposition to the United States. Today, Russia relies on Iranian UAVs and missiles for operations in Ukraine, coordinates diplomatically with Iran at the IAEA, and engages in sustained military-industrial cooperation that would have been politically unthinkable in the 1990s.

Mikhailov’s 1995 centrifuge offer, once viewed as a rogue episode at the margins of Russian policymaking, now reads as an early preview of a dynamic that has since become structurally embedded in the Russia-Iran relationship: the gradual normalization of norm-eroding behavior in the nuclear, military, and dual-use domains.

Had Iran obtained Russian centrifuge technology in 1995, its nuclear trajectory would have unfolded in an entirely different register. Instead of spending a decade reverse-engineering P-1 and P-2 designs through the A.Q. Khan network and struggling with rotor failures, bearing instabilities, and poor cascade reliability, Iran would have acquired a mature, industrial-grade enrichment architecture from the outset. After the 12 Day War, it is foreseeable that Iran may increasingly turn to Russia for the transfer of more sensitive nuclear technologies to rebuild. But Iran already has much of the knowledge needed to build a nuclear weapon on the fuel-cycle side of things. What is more likely is Iran looking towards Russia for support in the conventional domain, especially around survivability and accuracy. Of course, this does not mean that we may see Russia or Russian entities providing future support for discrete aspects of future weaponization-related work in Iran.

If it is indeed the latter, this is likely referring to Russia’s hydronuclear experiments—explosive tests in which a small amount of fissile material is driven into a briefly supercritical state, releasing a correspondingly small amount of nuclear energy. Under the U.S. interpretation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which enforces a strict “zero-yield” standard, any experiment that produces energy from a self-sustaining fission chain reaction constitutes a violation, regardless of yield magnitude.

A hydronuclear experiment uses high explosives to compress a small mass of fissile material—typically plutonium or uranium—beyond the critical configuration, allowing the neutron multiplication factor (k-effective) to exceed one for a fraction of a microsecond. That fleeting period of prompt criticality releases a measurable amount of fission energy—usually equivalent to a few kilograms of TNT. By contrast, a subcritical experiment compresses fissile material using similar implosion geometries but deliberately limits the configuration or mass so that k-effective stays below one at all times. Fission events occur, but the reaction dies out almost instantly; no net energy is released beyond that of the chemical explosive. These experiments generate diagnostic data without producing nuclear yield, and are therefore considered fully consistent with the CTBT’s zero-yield standard.

Russian officials have repeatedly affirmed that all post-1996 experiments conform to the zero-yield rule and are subcritical in nature. Yet successive U.S. State Department compliance reports have alleged that certain Russian experiments at Novaya Zemlya may have momentarily exceeded that threshold.

The Soviet Legacy

The Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons program relied on large-yield atmospheric and underground tests to validate weapon designs and demonstrate strategic power. Between 1949 and 1962, the USSR conducted over 200 nuclear explosions, culminating in the 1961 detonation of the “Tsar Bomba”—a 50-megaton hydrogen device tested at Novaya Zemlya, the most powerful explosion in human history. By the mid-1950s, Soviet scientists at Arzamas-16 (VNIIEF) and Chelyabinsk-70 (VNIITF) began conducting hydrodynamic and radiative implosion experiments—non-nuclear tests that replaced fissile cores with inert metals or small plutonium samples. Using high explosives and early flash-radiography techniques, these experiments examined how materials behaved under shock compression at millions of atmospheres of pressure. The goal was not yield, but understanding: to determine how a weapon core deforms, compresses, and heats under detonation conditions.

The shift toward more precise and instrumented testing accelerated in the early 1960s as the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) took shape. Soviet scientists had already begun exploring contained underground and laboratory-scale experiments, but the PTBT’s prohibition of nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater, which entered into force in October 1963, made such approaches essential. The Treaty did not ban underground nuclear explosions.

It was in this transitional period that the concept of hydronuclear testing took shape. In 1957, physicists at VNIIEF (Arzamas-16) proposed a new experimental method for studying the compressibility of uranium and plutonium under implosion conditions. They called it the method of non-explosive chain reactions, designed to probe the physical boundary between subcritical compression and the onset of supercriticality.

The first series of such experiments, carried out between 1958 and 1963, produced data on the equations of state of fissile materials, that is, how their density, pressure, and temperature evolve under extreme compression. Engineers conducted at least forty tests using spherical implosion charges that replicated the geometry of nuclear weapons but were engineered to stop short of a self-sustaining chain reaction.

“Developing our research on the compressibility of fissile materials, in 1958, we independently and almost simultaneously with the Americans proposed a high-precision method for determining the equations of state of uranium and plutonium at ultrahigh pressures... The authors of the method are Zeldovich, myself, and Styazhkin. On Khariton’s proposal it was named the method of non-explosive chain reactions.”
— Yu. M. Styazhkin, International Sakharov Conference, 1996

By the mid-1960s, VNIIEF and its sister institute, VNIITF (Chelyabinsk-70), had refined the technique into a formal testing regime. Official publications from the period describe “90 NCR experiments between 1958 and 1989”, conducted at Novaya Zemlya and Semipalatinsk. Each involved instrumented mock-ups containing small quantities of fissile material, diagnostic detectors, and—in many cases—explosion-proof containment chambers capable of withstanding blasts equivalent to 100–150 kilograms of TNT. Archival accounts from Rosatom’s Heritage of Russia series describe these experiments with unusual frankness. When such test devices were detonated, “radioactive substances were dispersed, which may contain a certain amount of fissile materials.”

In Soviet terminology, this definition established a quantitative threshold: a hydronuclear test was one in which the fission energy released was roughly equal to—or slightly greater than—the chemical energy driving the implosion, typically amounting to only kilograms of TNT in yield. Such experiments were treated as non-nuclear for classification purposes, since they produced no militarily significant energy release, but in physical terms they still involved a brief, supercritical chain reaction and therefore represented the lowest rung of actual nuclear testing.

“Explosive experiments with nuclear charges in which the amount of released nuclear energy is comparable to the energy of the chemical explosives are classified as hydronuclear tests (гидроядерные испытания). These are also not considered nuclear tests, unless this result occurs in a specially planned nuclear test.”

The Soviet aim was not weapon design per se, but validation. Hydronuclear experiments provided the data to model implosion symmetry, neutron behavior, and the compressibility of fissile metals—critical to predicting the performance and safety margins of stockpiled weapons.

After the Collapse: Testing in the CTBT Era

The collapse of the Soviet Union coincided with the international movement to halt all nuclear testing. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT)—opened for signature in 1996—prohibited “any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion”, effectively extending the earlier Partial Test Ban Treaty’s atmospheric ban to all environments. Russia signed the CTBT in 1996 and ratified it in 2000, though it subsequently withdrew its ratification in 2023.

Post-Soviet budgets were thin, and the Arctic facilities at Novaya Zemlya fell into disrepair. Yet, as Nuclear Testing: Book 1 (a Rosatom publication) makes clear, the site never went dark. Its laboratories continued subcritical testing in underground tunnels, using explosion-proof containment vessels and improved diagnostics. The goal was twofold: to ensure the safety of aging warheads and to preserve the capability to resume full testing “in case of need.”

By 1995, Russia had already resumed controlled experiments at Novaya Zemlya—four subcritical detonations that, as internal reports later noted, became the technical basis for Moscow’s decision to sign the CTBT. These experiments simulated the implosion phase of a weapon using small amounts of plutonium but stopped short of triggering a chain reaction. In other words, the fissile core was compressed to high density but never reached a supercritical state, where neutron multiplication would sustain a runaway fission reaction and produce a measurable yield. The results convinced officials at MinAtom and the 12th Main Directorate that Russia could continue evaluating its nuclear arsenal without crossing the CTBT’s “zero-yield” threshold. Crucially, Russian officials, in the past, confirmed their adherence to the zero-yield standard.

After the CTBT’s signing, Novaya Zemlya was quietly repositioned as a standing test complex in reserve. Subcritical and hydrodynamic experiments became the backbone of Russia’s stockpile stewardship strategy. These experiments, performed under joint supervision of Rosatom and the Ministry of Defense, used highly aged plutonium samples to study degradation effects and to validate computational models. Officials described them as both a scientific necessity and a political safeguard: a way to keep the technical chain of knowledge intact and the facilities “warm” for possible reactivation.

Viktor Mikhailov and the Question of Testing

Although Russia officially halted hydronuclear experiments after signing the CTBT, its officials periodically made statements suggesting that research of this kind had not entirely ceased. U.S. State Department compliance reports have raised concerns that Russia may have continued to conduct low-yield hydronuclear experiments at Novaya Zemlya—activities that could have crossed the boundary of the CTBT’s “zero-yield” standard. Several public statements from Viktor N. Mikhailov, the first Minister for Atomic Energy of the Russian Federation (1992–1998) and one of the central figures in maintaining Russia’s nuclear testing infrastructure through the country’s post-Soviet collapse, have alluded to engaging in such activities.

A nuclear physicist by training, Mikhailov specialized in non-explosive chain reactions, the theoretical and experimental basis for Soviet hydronuclear tests. During the 1990s, amid the economic chaos and industrial contraction that followed the fall of the USSR, he played a decisive role in preserving the scientific and technical core of the Russian weapons complex. Under his direction, the Ministry for Atomic Energy (MinAtom) kept the Novaya Zemlya test site intact, modernized its diagnostic facilities, and maintained readiness for both subcritical and hydrodynamic experiments. In a period when Russia’s nuclear industry was losing funding and personnel, Mikhailov ensured that the infrastructure and expertise for testing survived in a dormant but recoverable form.

In a 2001 article, he explained:

“Advanced nuclear powers, through hydronuclear experiments, can solve the tasks of increasing the reliability of the nuclear arsenal and effectively ensure its operation, reducing the risk of possible incidents.”

He added a crucial caveat:

“However, to create new models of nuclear weapons on the basis of these experiments—no state can. The absence of full-scale testing does not allow one to be certain of the correctness of the chosen physical scheme or weapon design.”

The message was that hydronuclear experiments could sustain, but not advance, Russia’s arsenal. Yet, by institutionalizing these experiments, Mikhailov ensured that Russia never fully stopped testing—it simply redefined what “testing” meant.

In one of his final retrospectives, published in Byulleten’ Atomnoy Energii in 2008 and titled “Each Nuclear Test — A Particle of One’s Life Given to Science,” Mikhailov described how his diploma research on non-explosive chain reactions had acquired new significance in the post-test-ban era. He wrote that, under the prohibition of full-scale testing, this approach became “the main instrument for ensuring the reliability of nuclear munitions.” He emphasized that hydrodynamic or hydronuclear experiments—using small quantities of fissile material under intense explosive compression—remained essential for studying how weapon components behaved under real detonation conditions.

Russia retained this ability throughout the post-Soviet period, preserving both the infrastructure and the legal framework to resume testing if required. The 2000 law “On the Ratification of the CTBT” requires the government to maintain “the basic potential for possible resumption of nuclear tests in case the Russian Federation withdraws from the Treaty.” In practice, this means keeping Novaya Zemlya operational for non-nuclear, subcritical, and hydrodynamic experiments, training new generations of test engineers, and maintaining the capacity to restart full-yield testing within months.

Over the past several years, senior Russian officials—including President Vladimir Putin, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and Rosatom Director Alexei Likhachev—have repeatedly stated that Russia is prepared to resume nuclear testing “if the United States does so first.” These public remarks, alongside visible infrastructure activity at Novaya Zemlya, reaffirm that the capability remains active—and that Russia’s legal and political framework treats testing not as a relic of the past, but as a dormant option.

Does this matter?

Hydronuclear experiments occupy a uniquely ambiguous space in the history of nuclear testing. Their yields are so small and contained that they are exceedingly difficult to detect or distinguish from legally permissible subcritical tests. Even advanced seismic and radionuclide monitoring systems, like those operated by the CTBT Organization’s International Monitoring System, would struggle to identify such events unless an experiment unintentionally “ran away” or vented radioactive gases. This ambiguity has fueled the long-running compliance dispute between Washington and Moscow.

While these experiments provide high-fidelity data on fissile material behavior under compression, their utility for verifying or improving existing warhead designs remains limited. Viktor Mikhailov acknowledged as much—arguing that hydronuclear tests could sustain confidence in the arsenal, but not substitute for full-scale nuclear trials. Whether Russia is actually conducting supercritical hydronuclear tests remains an open question. However, if Moscow were conducting hydronuclear experiments, this would clearly violate the CTBT’s zero-yield standard.

Resuming hydronuclear or any form of nuclear testing would be deeply counterproductive for the United States. Doing so would undermine Washington’s long-standing commitment to the zero-yield standard and almost certainly trigger even more escalatory reciprocal actions by Russia or China. Moreover, U.S. stockpile stewardship programs already provide a high level of confidence in warhead reliability through advanced simulation, subcritical experiments, and materials testing. A resumption of testing would therefore yield limited technical benefit while legitimizing others’ violations.

Russia has made clear that it will neither recognize nor comply with the reimposed sanctions. For months, Moscow has tried to delay, discredit, and diplomatically block the E3’s push toward snapback. And Moscow has made one thing abundantly clear: if the snapback goes through, Russia will not recognize it and will not comply.

This post kicks off a new series of commentary on Russia and the Iran nuclear issue. The first installment examines the controversy over snapback and the legal arguments Moscow has advanced to challenge it. Future posts will turn to Russia’s views on IAEA inspections in Iran and the Bushehr nuclear power plant, its position on a possible Iranian withdrawal from the NPT, and how Moscow is likely to respond once snapback sanctions are fully reinstated.

Russia’s legal arguments against snapback, however cumbersome they may appear, are central to its broader strategy. They underpin Moscow’s justification in the UN Security Council and, more importantly, provide the foundation for its refusal to comply with any reimposed sanctions. By constructing the narrative that the E3 acted outside the procedures of the JCPOA, Russia maintains that the snapback mechanism itself has no legal force. This framing allows Moscow to insist it is not violating international law when it continues trade, arms sales, or nuclear cooperation with Iran, even after UN sanctions are formally reinstated.

What Is Snapback?

The “snapback” mechanism in UN Security Council Resolution 2231 (2015) was meant as a failsafe. If any JCPOA participant believed Iran was in significant noncompliance, they could trigger a process that would automatically reinstate all previous UN sanctions lifted under the nuclear deal. Unlike ordinary Security Council action, snapback was designed to be immune to veto. Once a notification was submitted, the Council had 30 days to adopt a resolution to continue sanctions relief.

Ironically, it was Russia that originally helped design the snapback mechanism. During the 2015 JCPOA negotiations, Moscow played a key role in drafting the compromise that allowed automatic reimposition of sanctions while avoiding U.S. congressional obstruction and protecting P5 veto privileges. This gave the U.S. and E3 a backdoor enforcement tool.

However, since the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA, Russia has been particularly critical of snapback. This really came to the fore after Washington attempted to invoke it in 2020 during the first Trump administration. That summer, the Trump administration sought to extend the UN arms embargo on Iran, which was set to expire in October under Resolution 2231. The Security Council rejected the draft resolution, with only the Dominican Republic joining the United States in support. Then, Washington declared its intent to unilaterally trigger snapback in order to reinstate all previously lifted UN sanctions on Iran. Russia and China rejected this move outright, arguing that the United States, having formally exited the JCPOA, no longer retained legal standing to invoke enforcement mechanisms tied to an agreement it had abandoned.

To support this position on the arms embargo and snapback, Russia and China cited the 1971 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the legal consequences of South Africa’s presence in Namibia. That opinion held that a party that has disowned its obligations under an international agreement cannot continue to exercise the rights derived from it. Applying this principle to the Iran case, the Russian Foreign Ministry asserted that “having violated Security Council Resolution 2231 and declined to implement the JCPOA, the United States cannot retain the rights it claims under the agreement.”

The 2020 snapback episode marked a critical turning point in Russia’s evolving legal stance. It was then that Moscow first articulated the position that only countries actively upholding their JCPOA commitments could legitimately invoke its enforcement mechanisms. At the time, this was aimed squarely at the United States. But when the E3 began considering snapback in the summer of 2025, Russia initially returned to that same argument—alleging that the Europeans had failed to fulfill their own obligations, particularly with respect to sanctions relief. By August, however, Moscow’s focus shifted. It began emphasizing the procedural dimension, accusing the E3 of bypassing the JCPOA’s Dispute Resolution Mechanism. In Russia’s view, snapback could only be triggered after exhausting the Dispute Resolution Mechanism’s multi-step process.

The Road to Snapback

Over the past year or so, as Iran deepened its nuclear noncompliance and the expiration of key JCPOA provisions under Resolution 2231 drew closer, the E3 began deliberating whether to trigger snapback (I wrote about it here). Moscow, however, consistently rejected the legitimacy of any such move. Russian officials maintained that the E3 had no legal or procedural grounds to invoke the mechanism because they themselves had failed to fulfill JCPOA obligations through good-faith sanctions relief after the U.S. withdrawal in 2018.

Russia’s position hardened after the 12-day war in June. In the aftermath, Moscow sharpened its legal and political critique of the E3, echoing Tehran’s claim that the Europeans had effectively abandoned their role as neutral JCPOA participants. Russian officials argued that by backing or acquiescing to U.S. and Israeli military actions, the E3 had not only violated the spirit of the deal but also disqualified themselves from invoking its enforcement mechanisms.

In comments to Kommersant, the Russian Foreign Ministry clarified this position:

“The JCPOA, rightfully considered a major historical achievement of international diplomacy, today exists mainly only on paper…This is a direct consequence of the numerous violations of UN Security Council Resolution 2231 committed by the US and European countries. The Westerners do not intend to fulfill their obligations. They sabotaged efforts to restore the nuclear deal. At the same time, they stubbornly shift responsibility for its collapse onto Tehran, seeking to create in the international community a sense of an inevitable threat related to Iran’s nuclear program, which can be fought by any means.”

Russia also framed the snapback attempt as an assault on the legal foundation of the global nonproliferation regime itself. The Russian Foreign Ministry warned that the E3’s actions “have nothing to do with nuclear non-proliferation,” and instead aim to “call into question Iran’s right under Article IV of the NPT to peacefully develop nuclear energy.”

Russia and China’s Gambit

In late August, after months of denouncing the legitimacy of snapback, Russia and China sought to offer a diplomatic countermeasure. Just days before the E3 were expected to invoke snapback, Moscow and Beijing circulated a revised draft resolution at the Security Council that proposed extending the timeline for the implementation of the JCPOA and the associated provisions of UN Security Council Resolution 2231.

However, the initial draft went beyond a mere extension. It included a controversial clause that would have suspended all substantive Council deliberations on matters related to the JCPOA and Resolution 2231 for the duration of the six-month period. In practical terms, this would have barred the Security Council from convening any meetings or taking any action on Iran’s nuclear file during that time —effectively neutralizing the E3’s ability to invoke the snapback mechanism. Several Council members, including the United States and the E3, rejected this as an unacceptable circumvention of Resolution 2231’s enforcement mechanisms. Although Russia and China removed the most contentious clause in the final version, opposition remained.

On August 28, Dmitry Polyansky, Russia’s First Deputy Representative to the UN, unveiled a joint Russian-Chinese draft resolution to extend Resolution 2231 until April 18, 2026. Moscow presented the draft as a diplomatic offramp, insisting that the extension would create space “to find diplomatic solutions” on the Iran file. Polyansky sharply criticized the E3’s move toward snapback, declaring that it “cannot and should not entail any legal or procedural effect. It’s a mere escalatory step. It’s something that is absolutely showing that the Western countries do not know what diplomacy is about.” With Beijing’s backing, the draft allowed Russia to cast itself as a responsible mediator seeking compromise, while positioning Europe as the party escalating confrontation if the offer was rejected.

The Russian-Chinese resolution, however, gained little traction. That same day, Britain, France, and Germany formally declared Iran in “significant non-performance” of its JCPOA obligations, triggering the snapback clause in Resolution 2231. The move started the thirty-day clock: unless the Security Council voted affirmatively to continue sanctions relief, all prior UN sanctions would automatically reimpose. Moscow condemned the declaration as “a legally incorrect attempt to abuse Resolution 2231,” arguing that the Europeans were not entitled to use a mechanism tied to an agreement they themselves had undermined.

Procedural Issues

Since the E3 moved to trigger the snapback process, Russia has doubled down on procedural objections to cast the move as illegitimate. While Moscow continues to echo the argument that the Europeans cannot act in good faith because they have failed to uphold their own JCPOA obligations, its emphasis has shifted toward the process itself. By accusing the E3 of bypassing the agreement’s Dispute Resolution Mechanism, Russia is laying the groundwork to argue that any restored sanctions lack legal force. This would provide further justification for its own refusal to comply with such sanctions in the future.

Most of the Russian critique has to do with something known as the Dispute Resolution Mechanism which lays out a multi-step process designed to resolve allegations of noncompliance before resorting to punitive action. It begins with a party referring a compliance issue to the Joint Commission, which must review the matter within 15 days (or longer by consensus). If unresolved, the issue can then be escalated to foreign ministers, and ultimately to an advisory opinion by a three-member panel. Only after these steps have been exhausted can the concerned party notify the UN Security Council with the intent to reimpose sanctions.

Yet, the E3 formally invoked the JCPOA’s Dispute Resolution Mechanism in January 2020, a step they described as a necessary precursor to snapback. That move came in the aftermath of Iran’s systematic breaches of the deal following the U.S. withdrawal in 2018 and was framed not as an attempt to collapse the agreement, but as a way to preserve its legal architecture and keep enforcement options on the table.

From Moscow’s perspective, the E3 never properly initiated or completed this process, but instead jumped straight to the enforcement stage. On August 29, the Russian Foreign Ministry argued that “their claims that they have taken all necessary steps in this regard are untrue,” emphasizing that the Joint Commission had not been convened to resolve the dispute and that the Dispute Resolution Mechanism had never been fully activated. “By continuing to promote their distorted version of events, the Europeans are once again sinning against the truth,” the Russian Foreign Ministry declared. Russia insisted that the real priority should be to “resume constructive dialogue between the parties” and that this could be achieved by supporting the Russian-Chinese draft resolution.

Contrary to the Russian position, the E3 argued that they not only initiated the mechanism years earlier, but also engaged in repeated consultations through the Joint Commission and at the ministerial level. These steps, they contend, satisfied the procedural requirements of paragraph 36 of the JCPOA and gave Iran multiple opportunities to return to compliance. By 2025, after years of stalled diplomacy and deepening Iranian violations, the E3 maintained that snapback was a measure of last resort consistent with both the letter and spirit of Resolution 2231.

Russia’s focus on the Dispute Resolution Mechanism was on full display during the September 19 Security Council vote, which left Iran facing the automatic reimposition of UN sanctions by September 28 absent of a last-minute diplomatic breakthrough. During the UNSC debate, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, articulated that the E3 had violated JCPOA procedures, so their snapback attempt lacked legitimacy. “We see no legal, political, or procedural grounds for any steps in furtherance of the Europeans’ snapback pretensions,” Nebenzya stated.

After the vote, Nebenzya again declared that simply bringing the European resolution to a vote was “a direct violation of Resolution 2231 and of the JCPOA.” Therefore, Moscow “will not recognize either the purported actions taken, nor any further steps in this context” related to the snapback. Nebenzya also stressed that the JCPOA envisioned Iran’s sanctions relief as gradual and conditional, and in Russia’s “firm conviction, there are no reasons why [the sanctions] should not expire on 18 October” as scheduled.

Does it even matter?

Russia’s legal objections to snapback will ultimately have no effect on the formal outcome. Under Article 25 of the UN Charter, member states are obligated to carry out decisions of the Security Council. Resolution 2231 was drafted to make the snapback process automatic, irrespective of political disputes, by inverting the Council’s usual voting procedure. Even if Russia does not recognize the legitimacy of the process, the binding effect of Security Council decisions under Chapter VII of the Charter remains. When the thirty-day period expires without a resolution to continue sanctions relief, the pre-existing sanctions resolutions revive in full. That outcome is not contingent on Russian or Chinese assent, nor is it subject to reinterpretation by individual member states.

Even though snapback sanctions under Resolution 2231 are automatic and binding under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, their implementation depends on institutional machinery that Moscow can still obstruct. A key target is the revival of the 1737 Sanctions Committee, originally established in 2006 to monitor implementation of measures against Iran. To resume its functions, the committee requires consensus in the Council. Russia can block its reconstitution entirely or delay its mandate, effectively leaving sanctions enforcement without an operational body. The same is true of the Panel of Experts, the technical body that investigates violations and reports on compliance. Reappointing its members requires Council agreement, giving Moscow (and Beijing) leverage to veto or stall its formation. Without a Panel of Experts to collect evidence, document breaches, and recommend enforcement actions, sanctions remain “on paper” but could lack credibility in practice.

The function of Russia’s legal position, therefore, lies less in altering the statutory framework than in reframing the legitimacy of enforcement. Russia is essentially portraying the E3 as procedurally defective, arguing that they bypassed paragraph 36 of the JCPOA and the Dispute Resolution Mechanism. By doing so, Moscow seeks to recast compliance with Security Council resolutions as optional when they are, in fact, mandatory. This provides Russia with a justificatory narrative to continue arms sales, nuclear cooperation, and trade with Iran while claiming it is not in violation of international law. The appeal is not to the Council itself, but to sympathetic states in the General Assembly and the broader coalition of discontented states.

Where the Plan Stands

The bill has cleared the Majles (Iran’s parliament) National Security and Foreign Policy Commission. Approval in commission is only the beginning of the Iranian legislative process. The bill still requires approval in the plenary before being sent to the Guardian Council then to the President and relevant government organs for implementation

This bill is being portrayed as a necessary and comprehensive effort to rebuild Iran’s military capabilities. Hard-liners, in particular, have been calling for more military spending and for greater preparedness for the next war with Israel.

So far, Tehran has announced around $6 billion in initiatives. Yet roughly $1 billion of that figure simply covers arrears from 2024–25 allocations the military never received. The genuinely new commitments amount to about $5 billion. In theory, the Supreme National Security Council could call for additional funding as stipulated in the bill.

That being said, Iran’s official defense budget figures often conceal significant additional spending hidden in off-budget sources, such as allocations from oil revenues, frozen assets, or the Supreme National Security Council’s special decrees. These shadow funds create opacity, allowing Tehran to sustain military projects and procurement beyond the headline numbers reported in the state budget.

Despite the amped up rhetoric about a comprehensive rebuild, the budget is actually relatively modest. For perspective, Iran’s 2024 defense spending was estimated by SIPRI at around $7.9 billion. In 2023, it was estimated to be around $10.3 billion. SIPRI tends to have lower estimates than IISS and DIA. Numbers aside, the contents of the bill and the current discussions in Iran about military reconstitution lack the necessary strategic reorientation that the 12-day war should have triggered.

How the Money Is Structured

The allocations lean heavily on loans and oil-linked transfers rather than sustainable budget increases. Among the key provisions:

• $2.2B from the Central Bank (via frozen assets or other foreign currency abroad) as zero-interest loans for urgent defense projects

• $2.2B for the Ministry of Defense to purchase major foreign arms, coordinated with the General Staff

• $1.5B transferred from the Ministry of Oil directly to the General Staff

• $50-70M annually (about 30% of air transit revenues) earmarked for strengthening air defense systems

The Planning and Budget Organization is also required to allocate an annual share through savings or oil revenues, leaving the door open to additional funds. This structure reflects both the chronic fiscal pressures of the Iranian state and the political difficulty of openly increasing the defense line in the national budget at a time of widespread economic hardship.

For one, the reliance on frozen assets or foreign currency deposits abroad as zero-interest loans underscores the lack of liquid reserves within Iran. While it provides short-term liquidity, it is essentially a one-off mechanism that depends on the release or conversion of politically contingent funds. If sanctions tighten further or asset recovery stalls, this allocation will remain notional rather than executable. Similarly, oil revenues (long used as a funding stream for Iran’s defense spending) are sensitive to fluctuations in global oil prices and export volumes, both of which are constrained under sanctions and will be more so if a crisis emerges from snapback.

Business as Usual

During the 12-day war, Iran’s most glaring weakness was the fragility of its air defense network, which proved unable to stop deep Israeli strikes on critical infrastructure. Command-and-control and intelligence systems were quickly degraded, leaving Tehran with little capacity to coordinate defenses or sustain high-tempo operations. Although Iran’s missile forces launched salvos, their rate of fire declined sharply as bases, stockpiles, and logistics came under attack. More broadly, the 12-day war exposed the failure of forward defense and credible retaliation.

Yet, despite this experience, the priorities embedded in the current bill (and discussions within Iran) remain largely unchanged from pre-war patterns. Budgetary allocations are still funneled through the same mechanisms of oil revenue transfers, frozen asset releases, and ad hoc loan facilities, while procurement planning is reactive and narrowly scoped.

In effect, the legislation funds repairs and incremental acquisitions rather than forcing a doctrinal rethink. There is no indication of a decisive shift toward addressing the structural deficits in air defenses, command-and-control integration, radar coverage, or resilient basing that the conflict so clearly highlighted. Nor are there new efforts to expand indigenous R&D pipelines or overhaul defense-industrial bottlenecks.

The earmark of 30% of airspace overflight fees toward air defense looks almost symbolic when set against the vulnerability of Iran’s radar and interceptor network revealed during the war. Even at the upper end, this would barely cover a handful of modern interceptors or radar upgrades.

The only real difference is the relative emphasis on foreign procurement of major systems compared to the longstanding narrative of self-sufficiency and reliance on domestic industry. Even that pivot is less a transformation than a reluctant adjustment, reflecting recognition that key conventional platforms cannot be sourced indigenously at scale or within a relevant timeline.

The Shadow of Snapback

A potential vulnerability in Iran’s reconstitution plan lies in the reinstatement of snapback sanctions, which would restore the restrictive regime that prevailed prior to the JCPOA. The earlier embargoes under UNSCR 1747 (2007) and UNSCR 1929 (2010) not only prohibited the import of virtually all major conventional systems but also banned the associated infrastructure of spare parts, training, financial resources, and maintenance services.

UNSCR 1747 (2007) called on states to exercise restraint in transfers to Iran of any systems covered by the UN Register of Conventional Arms: battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, large-caliber artillery, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, missiles, and missile systems.

UNSCR 1929 (2010) strengthened this by prohibiting the direct or indirect supply of those same categories to Iran, and extended the prohibition to spare parts, related materiel, technical training, financial resources, maintenance, and associated services.

In practice, this regime constrained Iran’s ability to modernize its forces and forced reliance on smuggling networks, limited barter arrangements, and incremental domestic substitution. Although earlier embargoes did not explicitly list air defense systems among the prohibited categories, in practice suppliers treated them as covered under the broader restrictions (Russia and the S-300). As a result, Iran faced the same difficulties acquiring advanced air defenses as it did with offensive conventional platforms.

The current plan’s $2.2 billion earmark for foreign procurement is therefore somewhat of an unknown. While Russia and China oppose snapback, it is not guaranteed that either would step in to provide Iran with advanced systems under an embargo.

Russia, though politically aligned with Tehran, faces real constraints: its own defense industry is overburdened by the war in Ukraine, it has little capacity to extend weapons on credit, and Iran’s past experience with Russian arms deals has been characterized by repeated delays and under-delivery. China, by contrast, has the industrial capacity to supply the systems Iran most needs, but Beijing has historically been cautious about crossing U.N. sanctions lines when its broader economic interests are at stake; willingness, not capability, is the key constraint.

In this environment, North Korea is a plausible candidate for cooperation, particularly in areas such as underground construction, missile basing, and survivability measures, where Pyongyang has deep technical experience. At the same time, Iranian military discourse has increasingly referenced Pakistan as a potential defense partner.

Where is Iran headed?

The current discussions in Tehran, and the text of the bill itself, suggest that Iran is poised to continue pre-war patterns of defense planning rather than embarking on a smarter path characterized by introspection and adaptation. It remains unclear whether Iranian decision-makers have drawn the right lessons from that conflict, or whether the experience has been reframed domestically in ways that obscure its operational failures. Moreover, the reliance on oil revenues, frozen assets, and politically expedient loans underscores how deeply the military’s future is tied to Iran’s worsening economic situation.

If another confrontation with Israel erupts, these structural weaknesses could leave Iran in an even more precarious position than during the 12-day war, with fewer options for credible retaliation. This uncertainty is compounded by the lack of progress with the E3 on extending snapback sanctions and the parallel discourse in Tehran about a potential withdrawal from the NPT. Taken together, these dynamics point to a defense posture that is reactive and brittle — one that is sustained by rhetoric of resilience but vulnerable to both external pressure and internal crises.

“The Houthis, which began their attacks late last year over the Gaza war, eventually began using Russian satellite data as they expanded their strikes, said a person familiar with the matter and two European defense officials. The data was passed through members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who were embedded with the Houthis in Yemen, one of the people said.”

For me, I am most interested in what kind of satellite data - this could be anything from meteorological data to monitoring the movement of ships. My initial reaction was “Russia is giving them targets so their ships won’t be attacked.” The article wasn’t explicit on the data Russia provided and there are more knowledgeable experts who probably have a better comprehension on the technical aspects. For me, I’m more interested and better equipped to talk about the Russia-Iran angle on the Houthis and broader cooperation on satellite data.

The WSJ article does suggest that the IRGC is really assuming the role as the accelerator of Russia’s ties the Houthis in Yemen. While Russia’s intelligence services, including the SVR and GRU, do maintain some independent ties with the Houthis, the IRGC appears to be significantly enhancing the coordination between Russia and the Houthis. It’s likely both the Quds and Aerospace Forces involved in it, especially given the recent reports about Russia’s potential cruise missile deliveries to the Houthis - this isn’t just a Quds Force operation, IRGC Aerospace Force is likely involved as well.

More broadly, this tangentially brings me back to some of my suspicions about Russia’s possible support for Iran’s April and October attacks on Israel - big caveat here because this hasn’t been confirmed. I’ve been thinking about this for the past six months and thought I’d flush out some ideas about Russia’s potential - although unconfirmed - support for Iranian strikes on Israel. We already know that some Iranian missiles (Fateh family) are using GLONASS, basically Russian GPS, to enhance missile guidance. My question is what was the level of indirect Russian involvement in Iran’s strikes on Israel? And, if Russians are providing the IRGC with satellite data to support the Houthis, does this give us any indication about Russia’s support with Iranian targeting in April and October?

I want to go back to 2020 - the last time when a war was looming with Iran. After nearly a year of tankers being seized and attacks on oil infrastructure, Iran’s most prominent military commander with his own cult of personality was killed in a targeted drone assassination.

In January 2020, Iran launched a series of ballistic missile strikes against two Iraqi bases housing U.S. and coalition forces—Ain al-Asad airbase in Anbar province and a base in Erbil. The retaliation primarily involved Fateh-313 and Qiam-1 ballistic missiles (the Qiam was likely used in the April and October attacks, it’s an older liquid propellant vs the Fateh-313, part of the Fateh family of solid propellants). Anyway, some Russian military official apparently indicated to an Israeli publication that the Iranians used GLONASS satellite navigation system to enhance the accuracy of its missile strikes. GLONASS, Russia’s alternative to GPS, is not subject to U.S. control, and Iran theoretically could have used it as a backup or primary system for missile guidance. However, at the time, Russian military experts were skeptical about how reliably Iran could use GLONASS. Mostly because its functionality would likely be hindered by countermeasures like jamming or signal interference, especially in an active conflict zone. Plus it would also mean that Russia was willing to provide Iran with this data and, at the time, that would have been an escalation. The times have changed, of course. We now know that systems like the Fath-360 use GLONASS and likely there has been more efforts to integrate Iranian missiles/UAVs since the war in Ukraine. Caveat is that for Iran to access the military-grade version of GLONASS, Russia would have to provide cryptographic keys, which would enable Iran to use the encrypted signals designed for enhanced accuracy and protection against jamming. But, to be determined, because Russia would be more vulnerable by allowing Iran - a country deeply penetrated by Israeli and US intelligence - into a highly secured network.

In general, Russian support with targeting and guidance of Iranian missiles is something to look out for. Also Russian support for improving the accuracy of Iran’s longer range missiles but that’s a topic for another post.

TLDR: The ties between Russia and Iran have only strengthened since the 2020 attacks, and as today’s WSJl report indicates, Russia is now openly providing satellite data to groups like the Houthis in Yemen through the IRGC. This raises important questions about whether Russia could be offering similar support for Iran’s missile activities elsewhere, even if it remains officially unconfirmed.

Treaty not a Declaration

So for starters, this is going to be a treaty - not an declaration (декларация). This is probably an important distinction to make even if it is a bit mundane and boring. Russia has several ‘strategic partnership declarations’ but a declaration is generally a non-binding. It usually outlines common intentions, principles, or goals etc. Iran and Russia will sign a treaty (договор) - a legally binding agreement that establishes clear obligations and rights but, most importantly, it requires ratification by their respective parliaments (Duma and Majlis).

• Russia has a 2004 Treaty on Strategic Partnership with Uzbekistan but also a more recent 2022 Declaration on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Uzbekistan. For example, in the more recent declaration between Russia and Uzbekistan, it refers to the 2004 Treaty as its legal basis.

• Russia has a 2018 Declaration on Strategic Partnership between the Russian Federation and the United Arab Emirates but not a treaty.

• The recent Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between the Russian Federation and the the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea from June is treaty. In fact, Putin just submitted it to the Duma for ratification in early October.

• Russia has other Strategic Partnership treaties, or at least treaties that mention strategic partnership, with Egypt, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, and China (based off of Russia-China Treaty on Good-Neighborliness, Friendship, and Cooperation and also a more recent joint declaration affirming this). Interestingly, I have not been able to find a treaty on strategic partnership with India - just the declaration from 2001.

Timeline of a Treaty

Now that we’ve clarified the key difference between a treaty and a declaration, let’s walk through the treaty process in Russia and examine where the Russia-Iran treaty stands, as well as what to expect moving forward.

• Step 1: In Russia, the treaty process typically begins with negotiations conducted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or other relevant government ministries, depending on the nature of the treaty (e.g., defense, trade). These negotiations took place with their Iranian counterparts from 2019 up until late summer this year.

• Step 2: The Foreign Ministry typically submits the final draft of the treaty to the President for approval. As I mentioned in the post a few days ago, on September 18th, Putin signed the directive to “accept the proposal of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, agreed upon with the relevant federal government bodies and organizations, regarding the signing of the Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran.” The directive also authorized the Foreign Ministry “to make non-substantive amendments to its draft, during the negotiations for the signing of the aforementioned Treaty”

We are here now: the official signing of the treaty

The official signing will be held in Moscow between Putin and Pezeshkian after the BRICS summit in Kazan. Even when the Treaty is signed, it does not yet have legal force within Russia. It remains a non-binding agreement until it goes through the ratification process. The signed Treaty will then be submitted by the President to the the State Duma for ratification. Same goes for the Majlis in Iran. However, I would not be surprised if the Majlis have some issue over the Treaty and would opt to prolong the process due to the drama that is Iranian politics. Once it is approved, however, it will likely be registered with the United Nations register of treaties (as in the case of their 2001 Treaty).

What will be in the Treaty?

I initially planned to compare some of Russia’s other bilateral Strategic Partnership treaties, as they tend to follow a familiar framework. However, I'll save that for another post due to space constraints. Russia also has a habit of copying and pasting agreements Eg see the comparison below on Russia’s agreement with China and Iran on international law - only real changes were on the South China Sea.

Predicting the general contents of the Russia-Iran strategic partnership agreement is not really that difficult of a task. These agreements are typically vague and follow a similar format. If unilateral coercive measures or polycentric/multipolarity isn’t in the text, I will consider myself to be a failed specialist on the topic.

What I will be looking out for is the level of defense commitments, any interesting bilateral commissions, or cooperation in areas like space. For me, what will be more interesting will be reading in-between the lines of possible cooperation. Here is what I would imagine would be in the one between Iran and Russia, I might be wrong on certain points but this is what I would envision.

Preamble

• Building on the historical ties of good neighborly relations, mutual respect, and non-interference

• Something about the polycentric world order and the need to strengthen strategic cooperation in the face of emerging security, and economic challenges;

• Something about significant progress in bilateral relations, particularly in the fields of defense, trade, energy, scientific collaboration, cybersecurity, and regional stability;

• Commitment to the principles of sovereign equality, mutual respect, and non-interference in internal affairs, as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and other fundamental norms of international law;

• Desiring to elevate their relationship to the level of a comprehensive strategic partnership that reflects the deepening cooperation across political, military, economic, and cultural spheres;

• Shared goal of promoting regional peace, stability, and security, and their opposition to unilateral sanctions, external interference, and destabilizing actions by external actors;

• Collaborate more closely on the basis of mutual interest in addressing global and regional security threats, including terrorism, extremism, unilateral coercive measures, and cyber threats (if unilateral coercive measures is not in this agreement I will be so disappointed)

Comprehensive Strategic Partnership

• Same language used in almost every Russian treaty

• The Contracting Parties elevate their relations to a comprehensive strategic partnership, built on on the basis of sovereign equality, cooperation, mutual trust, respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence, and non-interference in each other's internal affairs.

• The Parties will expand their political, economic, military, security, and cultural cooperation across multiple domains, aiming for long-term stability and the development of both nations.

Political and Diplomatic Dialogue

• The Contracting Parties will institutionalize regular high-level political dialogue, including meetings between the Presidents of both countries, with the participation of senior officials from the ministries of foreign affairs, defense, economy, and security.

• Maybe a mention to the Russia-Iran Joint Economic Council, existing bilateral cooperation like Joint Military-Technical Commision

• Regular consultations will in multilateral organizations such as the United Nations, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, 3+3 etc

Non-Interference, Security, and Defense Cooperation

• Commitment to joint security and the protection of their national sovereignty, agreeing to enhance military-technical cooperation, including joint military exercises, intelligence sharing, and the development of defensive capabilities.

• Russia and Iran will not join or form alliances that are aimed at undermining the sovereignty, security, or territorial integrity of the other Party.

• Not to allow their territories to be used by third states for any actions or purposes that may undermine the sovereignty or security of the other Party.

• MAYBE In the event of an imminent threat of armed aggression against one of the Parties, the Parties, at the request of the threatened Party, shall promptly activate bilateral communication channels to conduct urgent consultations. These consultations will aim to coordinate their positions and explore practical measures to address the emerging threat, including offering diplomatic, logistical, or other forms of assistance in accordance with international law and the UN Charter. (This is similar to Russia-China and Russia-Mongolia)

• If Iran gets this clause like the DPRK Treaty, that would be a very big deal. In the event that one of the Parties is subjected to an armed attack by another State or group of States, the other Party shall engage in consultations to provide support in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter. This may include appropriate assistance, considering the capacity of each Party, and in line with their respective national legislation and international commitments. However, the part with respective national legislation is a cop-out the Russians use because they could argue that it is not in accordance with national law.

Economic Cooperation and Energy Development

• Expanding bilateral trade and investment cooperation, particularly in the fields of energy, infrastructure, and transportation.

• Collaboration on oil and gas projects, with an emphasis on joint exploration and production.

• Economic cooperation or some a joint investment fund to support infrastructure projects in both countries, including transportation corridors connecting Iran and Russia - something on INSTC eg improving shipping routes and logistics infrastructure, including through the INTSC.

• Cooperation in the nuclear energy sector will be further developed, including joint research on the peaceful use of nuclear energy and the exchange of technological expertise.

• Something on grain/wheat eg enhance trade in agricultural products, including wheat, ensuring food security.

• Promoting financial cooperation aimed at reducing reliance on the US dollar in bilateral trade and economic transactions. They will pursue the use of national currencies.

Scientific, Technological, and Cyber Cooperation

• Collaborate in science and technology.

• Cooperation in the healthcare sector, including the exchange of expertise in medical sciences, public health, and the development of pharmaceutical industries

• Cooperation in cyber defense, focusing on protecting critical infrastructure and combatting cybercrime.

• Building on their information security agreement, Russia and Iran will engage in regular cybersecurity dialogue, intelligence sharing, and joint exercises to bolster their cyber defenses and combat cybercrime more effectively.

• Opportunities for space cooperation eg exchange of expertise in satellite technology, space research, and space infrastructure development.

United Nations/Multilateralism/Unilateral Coercive Measures

• Strongly oppose the use of unilateral coercive measures by any state or group of states, which they deem to be illegal, counterproductive, and a violation of the UN Charter and international law. Such measures, including economic sanctions, trade embargoes, and other forms of external pressure, are inconsistent with the principles of sovereign equality and non-interference, and pose a serious threat to global economic stability and human rights.

• Immediate lifting of unilateral sanctions imposed outside UNSC, and for the international community to recognize the adverse humanitarian impacts of such measures.

• Coordinate their diplomatic efforts at the UN and other multilateral forums to condemn and work towards eliminating the use of unilateral coercive measures, and to promote a multilateral system that fosters dialogue and negotiation as the means to resolve international disputes.

Cultural and Educational Cooperation

• Cultural exchanges and the mutual learning of the Russian language in Iran and the Persian language in Russia, alongside increased cooperation between universities, research institutions, and cultural centers.

• Deepen cooperation through regular cultural exchanges, and interfaith dialogue; united against external efforts to impose cultural and ideological hegemony that threatens to undermine their civilizational identities

• Tourism through the simplification of visa regimes and the promotion of cultural heritage tourism in both countries.

Environmental Protection

• Maybe something on the Caspian Sea like the parties will work together on environmental protection, sustainable development, and management of shared resources such as the Caspian Sea.

Possible Clause on the Caspian Sea Treaty

• Russia and Iran reaffirm their commitment to the Caspian Sea’s unique legal status as governed by the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea, signed by the littoral states in 2018 -specifically prohibit foreign military forces from accessing the Caspian region.

• Caspian belongs exclusively to the five littoral states and agree that the management of its resources and security must be handled solely by these state

Potentially terrorism and customs

• Joint efforts to combat terrorism, extremism, transnational crime, and human trafficking.

• Customs cooperation to prevent illicit trade and ensure secure borders.

Updating Treaty

From the date of entry into force of this Treaty, the Treaty of Mutual Relations between the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran shall cease to be in effect.

Renewal of Treaty/Enforcement

Treaty will be in force for 20 years, with automatic renewal every 5 years.

Maybe something on dispute mechanisms, it will also include a provision on ratification.

That’s all I have to say for now, I will probably post some updates on the BRICS summit and then do a deep-dive into the Treaty once it is published.