Inside the Russian effort to build 6,000 attack drones - with Iran's help

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

56% : In correspondence and other documents, engineers used coded language: Drones were "boats," their explosives were "bumpers," and Iran - the country covertly providing technical assistance - was "Ireland" or "Belarus."Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post.
55% : A spreadsheet created by a senior engineer on Nov. 5, titled "Questions asked to Iran at the very beginning of cooperation," listed a request for a copy of the engine as "the most important point.""Better two: one to take apart, and after the chemical analysis it will not be functional; the second one is for comparative tests.
55% : Numerous Alabuga employees have traveled to drone manufacturing centers in Iran to gain expertise, according to personnel documents.
54% : Under agreements reached earlier, more than half of that sum was to go to Iran, which insisted on being paid in dollars or gold because of the volatility of the ruble, the individual who provided the documents said.
52% : The Kremlin has dismissed reports that it is receiving assistance from Tehran on drones, saying that Russia relies on its own research and development.
52% : It found that key parts - the motor and warhead - were produced by Tehran.
51% : "We knew the drone was from Iran," said Gleb Kanievskyi, the founder of the StateWatch think tank.
51% :Under the deal, the new documents show, Tehran agreed to sell Moscow what is effectively a franchise, with Iranian specialists sharing project documentation, locally produced or reverse-engineered components, and know-how.
51% : A detailed inventory, based on data provided to the Russians by Tehran, shows that over 90 percent of the drone system's computer chips and electrical components are manufactured in the West, primarily in the United States.
50% : The documents show that the facility's engineers are trying to improve on Iran's dated manufacturing techniques, using Russian industrial expertise to produce the drones on a larger scale than Tehran has achieved and with greater quality control.
50% : The documents do not suggest that any Western company directly supplied Iran or Russia with components used in production of the drone.
48% : This was Russia's billion-dollar weapons deal with Iran coming to life in November, 500 miles east of Moscow in the Tatarstan region.
48% : Even so, David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who helped lead the research team that studied the documents, said: "Alabuga looks to be seeking a drone developmental capability that exceeds Iran's."
48% :"Russia has a credible way of building over the next year or so a capability to go from periodically launching tens of imported Shahed-136 kamikaze drones against Ukrainian targets to more regularly attacking with hundreds of them," Albright told The Post.Albright said the disclosure of the records makes it difficult for Iran - which has publicly declared it is neutral in the war - to claim that it is not helping Moscow develop the ability to manufacture drones at Alabuga.
48% : To catch up, Moscow has had to turn to Iran, one of the few nations willing to sell it military hardware.
47% : That month, Iran acknowledged it had provided drones to Russia but said it had done so only before the start of the war.
47% : One document from February includes a log of damaged or faulty drones received in a second shipment of the UAVs from Iran - separated into the categories of "big boats" and "small boats," which refer to the Shahed-136 and the Shahed-131, respectively, despite Alabuga's mainly being interested in the former.
45% : While one group was visiting Tehran on Jan. 29, Israeli's external intelligence service, the Mossad, carried out a strike on a weapons factory in the Iranian city of Isfahan, leaving flames billowing from a site believed to be a production hub for drones and missiles.
45% : The documents also reveal that Central Asian workers who held low-level jobs at Alabuga were sent to Iran because they speak a language similar to Farsi.
44% : Although Western officials have revealed the existence of the facility and Moscow's partnership with Tehran, documents leaked from the program and obtained by The Washington Post provide new information about the effort by two self-proclaimed enemies of the United States - under some of the world's heaviest sanctions - to expand the Kremlin's drone program.
44% : The questions - over 120 in total - were separated into thematic categories that include "policy" and "warhead," and requested details on how Iran achieved mass production.
44% : "But as you can see, Iran pressed its own conditions for the deal and supplied smaller models, many of them broken."
43% : The facility has reassembled drones provided by Iran but has itself manufactured only drone bodies, and probably for not more than 300 of the UAVs, the researchers concluded.
37% : Iran's mission to the United Nations also did not respond to a request for comment.
37% : "That was an interesting moment, because the initial agreement with Iran concerned only big Shahed drones, as the smaller 131 model is pretty useless - its payload is ten times lower compared to the 136 model, and it can maybe blow up a car," the individual said.
35% : An estimated 25 percent of the drones shipped from Iran for Alabuga's use and delivered by Russian Defense Ministry aircraft were damaged, according to the documents and the individual who provided them.
33% : A February memo shows that project managers warned their higher-ups about a 37-day delay in the schedule as communications with Iran were slowed by the Russian Defense Ministry's bureaucracy and Iran's failure to provide some technical documentation.
32% : The Shahed-136 is powered by a reverse-engineered German Limbach Flugmotoren L550E engine, which Iran illicitly obtained two decades ago.

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