European intelligence sources said on Wednesday that Russia has developed a new model of attack drone in China with the help of Chinese specialists and will soon deploy that weapon on the battlefields of Ukraine.
Reuters on Wednesday reviewed documents that purportedly showed IEMZ Kupol, a subsidiary of a Russian state-owned arms manufacturer called Almaz-Antey, has developed a new drone called the Garpiya-3 in China with the assistance of “local specialists.”
These documents included a message from IEMZ Kupol to the Russian Defense Ministry stating that the company was ready to begin mass-producing the Garpiya-3 drone at a factory in China and shipping them to the front lines of the “special military operation” in Ukraine.
The documents described the G3 as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a range of about 1,200 miles and a military payload of 110 pounds. These are not hugely impressive performance statistics – the fabled Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drone, beloved of the Ukrainian military, has longer range and triple the payload – but any new source of drone weapons for the Russian war machine is cause for concern.
If the documentation obtained by European intelligence is correct, the G3 would be an evolution of the Garpiya-A1 drone, a flying-bomb “kamikaze” drone incorporating a Chinese-built engine and other parts that was deployed in Ukraine last year. IEMZ Kupol has produced at least 2,500 G1 models since July 2023.
Before then, Russia was heavily dependent on Iran’s Shahed series of kamikaze drone and Russian knockoffs of the Iranian design. The G1 is very similar to the Shahed in many respects, but included an extra bolt-on fin and upgraded engines that appeared to give it longer “loitering” time while airborne.
According to Reuters’ sources, the Russian company has taken delivery of seven drones from China, two of them G3 models, and is evaluating them at company headquarters in Izhevsk, Russia.
China frequently boasts of its “unlimited partnership” with Russia and has refused to condemn President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, but producing weapons for the Russians would be a game-changing development, demolishing China’s hopes of passing itself off as a fair-minded observer who might be able to broker a peace deal.
China has also seemed reluctant to expose itself to sanctions against the Russian war effort until now, as it has carefully supplied Russia with “dual-use” products that have legitimate non-military applications. Rendering direct lethal assistance to Russia would cross a line that Beijing has thus far been careful to toe. IEMZ Kupol has been under U.S. sanctions since December 2023.
“This adds to a growing body of open-source evidence that Chinese companies are enabling Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. The supply of weapons would be a direct contradiction to statements from China that it would not provide weapons to relevant parties of the conflict,” a spokesman for the British Foreign Office told Reuters.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry has previously denied supplying arms to Russia, but this time when Reuters asked for a comment, the ministry sneered that Western nations have “double standards on arms sales” because they have happily “added fuel to the flames of the Ukraine crisis” by supplying Kyiv with weapons.
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