According to unconfirmed reports, today, the Russian army is armed with about 200 Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones. It is known that the Russians renamed these drones to Geran, which gave the Iranian side a reason to claim that they did not supply their drones to Russia. Geran or Shahed-136, but 86 drones have already been used in combat, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine have already destroyed 60% of them. As opposed to vulnerable drones, more than 20 HIMARS serve in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and new deliveries are expected.
"Russia's use of Iranian-made drones is not generating asymmetric effects the way the Ukrainian use of US-provided HIMARS systems has done and is unlikely to affect the course of the war significantly," ISW.
According to the Institute of Study of War, the Russian army under Putin's command does not orientate these drones on the battlefield. Instead, they use drones against civilian infrastructure, "likely hoping to generate nonlinear effects through terror." Nevertheless, these efforts were unlikely to be crowned with the success that the occupiers were counting on.
According to Yuriy Ignat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force command, the Russians are more likely to resort to using Iranian drones, thus maintaining a supply of their "high-precision" missiles. It is likely that the Russian army has used a non-trivial number of Shahed-136s so far, and if the US intelligence data cited by ISW is correct, Iran is likely to transfer hundreds more drones to Russia.
