After heavy bombardment from the U.S. and Israeli forces, Iran’s IRGC is still fighting back with occasional drone and ballistic missile strikes in the Middle East and Israel.
Yuan Hongbin, a former professor at Peking University, confirmed in an interview with Beijing Times that China is still supplying weapons to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps via Russia, Tajikistan and Pakistan.
China and Russia are sending combat support to Iran via the Caspian Sea using a maritime route. This shipment includes kamikaze drones and military material support to the IRGC.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated laconically that Moscow’s military cooperation with Tehran was “good”.
His words seemed to confirm earlier media reports that Russia is providing Iran with satellite and intelligence data on the locations of US warships and aircraft.
It may not sound like much, given the superiority of Western military satellites and Russia’s battlefield losses and communication problems after Elon Musk’s SpaceX company switched off smuggled Starlink satellite Internet terminals.
But data on US military assets Iran is receiving most likely comes from Liana, Moscow’s only fully functional system of spy satellites, according to an expert on Russia’s space programme and military.
“The [Liana] system has been created to spy on US carrier strike groups and other navy forces and for identifying them as targets,” Pavel Luzin, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a US think tank, told Global Defense Corp.
On Wednesday, the Financial Times, citing Western intelligence assessments, reported that Russia had begun a “phased shipment of drones, medicine and food to Iran” in early March, with deliveries “expected to be completed by the end of the month.” Likewise, The New York Times reported that two senior European officials “said their intelligence agencies believed that Russia was preparing to deliver drones to Iran for use in the war with the United States and Israel.” The Guardian ran a similar story on Friday.
These revelations shed new light on a recent Israeli strike on Iran’s Bandar Anzali port on the Caspian Sea. According to a Wall Street Journal report citing unnamed sources, that strike was intended to disrupt “Russia’s support for Iran in the war.” Iran had previously sent Shahed-136s and other materiel to Russia via the Caspian Sea, providing a relatively cheap means of augmenting Moscow’s long-range strike capabilities. Now those drones may be flowing the other way.
Beginning in 2023, Russia, with Iranian help, localized production of the Shahed-136, which the Russians call the Geran-2 and Garpiya-A1. Russian industry has since churned out these drones in ever-greater numbers, producing an estimated 2,700 per month by mid-2025. That number is expected to keep growing.
Turkmenistan link
In May 2022, Iran officially inaugurated a factory in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, to produce the Ababil-2 tactical drone. This facility was designed for surveillance and attack missions, marking a significant expansion of Iran’s military footprint in the region.
Iran has historically sought to export its military technology to countries that can assist the IRGC to bypass international isolation.
A major Iranian-designed drone factory, producing Shahed-type, is operational in the Yelabuga Special Economic Zone in Russia, which has significantly increased in size by 2026.
While Iran and Turkmenistan share a long border and maintain positive, cooperative relations, since the beginning of the war, Tajikistan has shipped its drones to Iran via the Turkmenistan border.
Pakistan’s duplicity between Iran and Saudi Arabia
Many underground Iranian bunkers and roads were built with the assistance of Chinese engineers and civilian construction companies.
While Pakistan signed a mutual defence agreement with Saudi Arabia, it allowed weapons shipments to Iran via its land border.
Given Iran’s geography, the Chinese province closest to Iran is the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Xinjiang shares no direct border with Iran, but it is the westernmost provincial-level division of China and serves as the overland hub for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the Belt and Road Initiative, which connects China to Central Asia and Iranian infrastructure.
As of early 2026, China and Iran maintain a 25-year strategic partnership signed in 2021. China is the primary buyer of Iranian oil, with reports indicating China purchased over 80% of Iran’s shipped oil in 2025.
Following the Iran war between Washington/Tel Aviv and Tehran, China is sending weapons shipments to Iran via the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to avoid confrontation with the U.S. and secondary sanctions.
China transferred a large quantity of Beidou navigation receivers to Iran for use in Iran’s Shahed drones. Iran’s missiles, drones and military hardware parts are manufactured in China.
The Chinese Communist Party has two clear goals in Iran and Russia: one goal is to test newly developed military components and weapons in Iran and Russia, and the second goal is to assist the IRGC and support planning the attacks against the U.S. and Israel to transform Iran into the next Afghan war for the next 20 years to deplete America’s missiles and fighter jets’ service life in the Iran war.
Behind the scenes, China has played a key role in supporting the IRGC and even the Russian army’s capability to fight the war in Ukraine for the past four years, which is supported by the Chinese communist party.
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