Biden Arming Russians In War Against Ukraine
By George Rasley
While Joe Biden sends billions of dollars of American taxpayer money and military hardware to Ukraine and Democrats and their Hollywood celebrity allies virtue signal by displaying
Ukrainian flags on every flat surface from websites to automobiles the Biden administration is also helping to arm Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s kleptocratic Russian regime.
How can that be you ask, given the Democrats’ vilification of Putin and Russia?
Simple, it’s all going through the Democrats’ pet Muslim dictatorship, Iran.
Of more than 200 technical components found in remains of shot-down Iranian drones, at least half could be traced to U.S. firms and a third to firms in Japan, the Wall Street Journal reported citing a Ukrainian military intelligence verified in a report by Ukraine’s Independent Anti-Corruption Commission (NAKO) and viewed by the outlet. Despite U.S. efforts to thwart Russia’s supply of Iranian drones, the Kremlin continues to employ the weapons in highly destructive attacks on civilian targets throughout Ukraine.
Ukrainian intelligence estimated that up to three quarters of the parts in Iran’s drones, primarily the Shahed-136 “suicide” drone and the Mohajer-6, were of U.S. origin, according to a Foreign Desk summary of the WSJ reporting.
Our friend Dr. Stephen Bryen, writing for the Asia Times, reports an oil tanker owned by an Israeli billionaire was hit by a suicide drone off the coast of Oman on November 15.
Israeli government experts believe the drone that struck the tanker was an Iranian Shahed-136, and here’s where it gets interesting.
As Dr. Bryen explained, the stock version of the Shahed drone is not known to be capable of hitting moving objects as it has no camera, radar or other onboard sensor.
How, then, did the drone identify and strike the Israeli tanker?
The Shahed-136 has been sold by Iran to Russia, apparently in the thousands, and is being used primarily against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure.
The drone itself is made up mainly of Western electronics (mostly American) mounted on five custom circuit boards and has a Mado (originally German) MD-550 four-cylinder gasoline engine claimed to be made in Iran but likely produced in China.
When the Russians got the Shahed-136 from Iran, they replaced the drone’s accuracy-challenged inertial navigation system with a Russian GLONASS satellite navigation system. Russia renamed the modified Shahed-136 the Geran-2, wrote Dr. Bryen.
There is reason to believe, says Bryen, that the drone that struck the Israeli-owned oil tanker was a modified Shahed-136, suggesting that the improvements made by the Russians have been incorporated into Iranian production.
The Russian modifications made it possible to work over a longer distance using the same engine. Russia says the Geran-2 range is now 1,800 to 2,500 kilometers.
At the same time, Bryen said the modifications probably also made it possible to program the drone while it’s in flight. That means coordinates could be sent to the Shahed-136 from a nearby aircraft, drone or ground station command post.
Here’s more on Iran’s drone program and stopping it from Dr. Bryen.
We won’t put words in Dr. Bryen’s article that aren’t there, so let’s make it clear these are our observations and conclusion.
Iran’s Shahed-136 drone couldn’t even get off the ground without American designed and produced technology, especially the crucial circuit boards.
And they couldn’t produce the Shahed-136 drone in their thousands without money, specifically oil money, since that is the only thing Iran produces for which there is an export market.
How does Iran get American technology and international oil revenue?
By finding loopholes in the Biden administration’s failed sanctions on the rogue Islamic Republic or by circumventing the Biden administration’s lax administration of those sanctions.
If Biden and the Democrats are serious about helping Ukraine defeat the Russian invasion and restoring Ukrainian sovereignty over its historic borders one of the most effective things they could do, without spending a dime of American taxpayer money, is to cut-off the supply of arms and technology flowing to Iran and on to the Russian military machine.
George Rasley is editor of Conservative HQ.
Published with permission of conservativehq.com