TEHRAN – Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian was in Moscow on Wednesday for a visit he said covered military cooperation among a host of other bilateral and regional issues.
“Obviously, defense cooperation is one of the main issues on the joint agenda of Iran and Russia,” he declared as he left for Moscow, where he joined his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov at a joint press conference.
In an interview with Russian state television, Amir-Abdollahian was asked about a Wall Street Journal report this week that quoted US officials as saying that Moscow is giving Tehran “cyber warfare” and “surveillance software” to exchange of Iranian drones.
“Iran’s military cooperation does not harm any party,” Amir-Abdollahian said, without addressing any details in the report.
Iran has faced unrelenting international pressure over the drones it has been supplying to Russia that are used in deadly operations in Ukraine. Tehran has disallowed deliveries beyond a series of shipments made months after the conflict.
However, during the course of the Ukraine war and amid the ongoing anti-government riots in Iran, military ties between the two sanctions-hit countries have seen a sharp uptick.
Just recently, on March 11, Iran’s permanent mission to the United Nations announced that a deal had been finalized for the purchase of Sukhoi-35 fighter jets by Tehran from Moscow. Precise numbers remain unclear, but Iran has long been seeking the aircraft to improve its crumbling airpower.
Under decades of international sanctions, Iran’s air force has lagged behind and struggled to survive with multiple overhauls and the occasional reverse-engineering project.
According to Iranian officials, the Sukhoi-35 deal was made possible by the lifting of a long-standing international arms embargo on Iran. The restrictions were officially removed in 2020 under Resolution 2231, which allowed the Islamic Republic, at least on paper, to buy and sell conventional weapons.
The new purchases coincided with previous announcements, including one in January by an Iranian lawmaker, who said a squad would arrive by the end of March.
Some observers have argued that those planes are Russia’s payment for Iranian drones, particularly the Shahed-129 and 191, which are produced at a facility in the central city of Kashan, which was reportedly visited by Russian military representatives in July. .
In February, a New York Times analysis of satellite imagery combined with an Iranian state television propaganda video of the inauguration of an underground airbase detected signs that the site was being prepared to house Russian-made planes.
