There’s One Country Keeping Putin’s Desperate Bombing Campaign Alive

Vladimir Putin is running out of missiles and looking to Iran for solutions. As Monday’s attack on Kyiv with Iranian-supplied drones shows, Russia’s stockpiles of advanced systems are wearing thin. Tehran provided hundreds of drones over the summer, but reporting from The Washington Post indicates that new shipments will include ballistic missiles with ranges between 200 and 450 miles.

It’s no mystery why Russia is short of missiles: last week Russia launched a massive salvo of missiles and drones against civilians across Ukraine. Some estimates claim Putin spent as much as $700 million on the strikes, which hit everything from city parks to energy infrastructure—even though Russia’s production of missiles and other weapons is struggling in the face of Western sanctions.

Much like drones, Iran has invested in its missile program for decades in the face of heavy sanctions. According to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s 2019 report on Iran’s military, Iran “has the largest missile force in the Middle East, with a substantial inventory of close-range ballistic missiles (CRBMs), short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs), and medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) that can strike targets…as far as 2,000 kilometers from Iran’s borders.”

Iranian missiles will boost Russia’s options, but aid is also on the way to Ukraine. Last Tuesday, the Biden administration announced that they would rush deliveries of advanced air defense systems to Ukraine. France, Germany, and the U.K. have also promised anti-air systems.

The U.S. and others have sent Ukraine many different kinds of air defenses, but for now President Biden is prioritizing the delivery of the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System, known mostly as the NASAMS. Unlike shoulder-mounted missiles like the stinger or older Soviet-era missiles, the NASAMS system is advanced enough for important missions like defending the White House and Pentagon. NASAMS will certainly help defend Ukrainian airspace from Russian planes and missiles, but just sending a few more NASAMS will not be enough to prevent attacks on civilian centers across the country from happening again. 

There are two challenges to defending Ukraine from missile and drone attacks. On the one hand, Ukraine will need to cover the breadth of its front line as well as its civilian population if it wants to intercept every Russian missile or drone. Russia’s potential avenues of attack, including the border with Belarus, and southern coastline, covers hundreds of miles. Defending the whole area would require a huge number of systems like the NASAMS to reasonably catch anything Russia puts in the sky.