Iranian students return from Russia with potentially deadly knowledge about drones and AI

In 2000, Iranian Ali Mohammad Amouei graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI), a renowned Russian technical university focused on space and rocket engineering. His expertise lies in gas turbine engines – the type of engines used to power passenger jets and fighter jets, as well as cruise missiles and drones.

After returning to Iran, Amouei began to rise through the ranks of the aviation industry, according to his LinkedIn profile. By 2017, he had become a senior executive at Farsco, a company whose ownership includes Mahan Air, an airline that the United States has already imposed sanctions on for its ties to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

In 2020, Washington imposed sanctions on Farsco itself, accusing it of illegally purchasing helicopters manufactured in the United States.

Mohammad Hosseinpour Khanmiri returned to Iran in 2022, after several years in Russia, where he had begun his studies at St. Petersburg State University in 2015.

He and his advisor there, senior researcher Roman Bogdanov, developed a method for measuring the ratios of uranium and thorium isotopes in natural mineral samples. This collaboration was part of a broader partnership dating back to the early 90s, when Russia began helping Iran build its nuclear energy program and its sole nuclear power plant, at Bushehr.

In his country, Khanmiri used this method on ore from Saghandi, Iran's main uranium deposit. Online references indicate that he now works at the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran or an affiliated nuclear research institute, which is under Western sanctions.

The educational and professional paths of Amoueu and Khanmir are by no means isolated cases: For decades, Russia has trained Iranian specialists and helped develop their scientific careers in fields that have practical applications in the defense industry and nuclear activities, creating a kind of conduit of dual-use technologies between the two countries.

An analysis of research published over the past 10 years, conducted by REL's Russian research unit, Systema, shows that Russia and Iran have continued to cooperate in areas of particular importance to the Iranian defense industry.

These fields now include not only traditional sectors, such as missile propulsion and uranium enrichment, but also technologies used in both Russia's war against Ukraine and the US-Israeli war with Iran, such as electronic warfare, spoofing GPS signals to mislead navigation systems, and artificial intelligence for drones.

"This has been a long-term goal of the Iranians, to have access to this information or any kind of information," in the nuclear field, but also "in other sensitive areas, such as artificial intelligence and everything related to aerospace," said Nicole Grajewski, an expert at Sciences Po University in Paris and author of a book published in 2024 on Russia-Iran relations.

“None of the Iranian research efforts, especially those involving doctoral students going abroad, are entirely apolitical,” Grajewski told REL in a phone conversation. “In most cases, they have some kind of connection to the government or some other ulterior motive.”

The same goes for some Russian technical research institutes, she said, but added: “In general, Iran has been the country that has sought more cooperation from Russia, as opposed to Russia going to Iran.”

"Our friends in Russia"

“In many cases, we have a certain degree of self-sufficiency in defense,” said Mohammad Javad Zarif, then Iran’s foreign minister, in 2020. “In some cases, we have serious needs for cooperation in the field of armaments with our friends in Russia and other countries.”

The extent of academic ties has fluctuated depending on geopolitical developments and the ups and downs in relations between Russia and Iran, as well as their respective ties with the West. The number of Iranians studying at Russian universities has increased significantly since President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Military and industrial ties between Russia and Iran have been in the spotlight during this war, which is now approaching its fifth anniversary, as well as during the US-Israeli war with Iran, which broke out in February.

In addition to missiles and other munitions, Iran provided many of the drones used by Russia in the early stages of the full-scale invasion, while Russia is now mass-producing domestically produced versions using the same technology. Experts say the cooperation works both ways: Moscow has also shared technological improvements with Tehran.

Beyond that, Russia reportedly provided Iran with intelligence and other data to help it target US assets in the Persian Gulf region during the war there. The Financial Times reported this month that Russia has been covertly helping Iran develop advanced supersonic cruise missiles since 2023.

Cooperation in missile engineering began in the 90s, when Russian institutes and companies helped Iran develop its first domestically produced ballistic missile.

As for aircraft engines, Iran has experience in repairing them and producing individual parts, but it has never mass-produced a complete engine for civilian aircraft. What it has mastered in this field are small gas turbine engines – Amoue’s specialty – produced for cruise missiles and drones.

Cooperation during the war

As Amouei delved deeper and deeper into the world of Iranian defense-related aviation, he did not stop publishing papers with his old contacts in Russia.

In 2016, he co-authored a paper on protective coatings for turbine blades, along with other Iranians and an MAI lecturer. In 2021, he published again – this time under the name of an Iranian university affiliated with the Defense Science and Technology Research Center, which is directly linked to the Iranian Ministry of Defense.

Israel bombed a campus connected to the same network in 2025, while the US military has linked it to Iran's nuclear program.

It is not clear whether Amouei had a permanent position at the Iranian university. Systema attempted to contact him and the other Iranians who had studied in Russia and are mentioned in this report, but none of them responded.

Other names featured in that 2021 paper included Aleksei Boitsov, head of a department at MAI who also advises Russia’s state-owned defense and space giants Rostec and Roscosmos. Amouei was not the only Iranian scientist trained by Boitsov: at least four others appear in the same research field.

In 1999, a year before Amouei completed his studies in Russia, the United States imposed sanctions on a group of Russian universities suspected of helping Iran develop missile and nuclear technology, including MAI.

The sanctions were lifted in 2010, during President Barack Obama's policy with Moscow and just three days after Russia and Washington agreed on a new joint package of sanctions on Iran.

From the late 2000s to the early 2010s, military cooperation between Russia and Iran generally declined. But that changed after Putin returned to the presidency in 2012. In early 2015, Moscow and Tehran signed a new agreement on military cooperation.

In the years that followed, this type of cooperation began to grow again, and was further intensified during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. By 2025, nearly 10.000 Iranians were studying at Russian universities, a 42 percent increase in just two years.

Joint works by Russian and Iranian scientists remain rarer than those with European or American researchers, but even that is changing. At some major technical universities, such as ITMO in St. Petersburg, Iranian co-authors had almost overtaken Germans by 2025 – whereas before the full-scale war, Germany was St. Petersburg’s main research partner.

Signal blocking and falsification

Documents reviewed by Systema showed that academic researchers from Russia and Iran are also working together on GPS jamming and spoofing, technology that blocks or spoofs GPS signals. Iran has been using this technology since the early 2010s to defend itself against missile and drone attacks and to mislead the navigation systems of enemy aircraft and ships.

Mohammad Reza Mosavi, a professor of electrical engineering at the Iran University of Science and Technology, is one of the most published Iranian researchers on GPS.

In 2016, Mosavi co-authored a paper with Stepan Shafran, a Russian scientist who heads the engineering sector of a project to develop radio navigation and communications technology.

One of the project partners is a company that produces, among other things, the Orlan-10 drone and on which the United States imposed sanctions that same year for assisting the Russian military intelligence agency, known as the GRU, in electronic espionage.

In 2015, Amir Tabatabaei, a graduate student from a university in Tehran, went to Russia to study at a laboratory founded by Kai Borre, a Danish satellite navigation expert who died in 2017, and which was part of Samara University, a large technical institution about 860 kilometers from Moscow.

Tabatabaei's early research focused on GLONASS — the Russian satellite positioning system that Iran also uses to improve the accuracy of its ballistic missiles. His laboratory in Tehran already had a working GLONASS receiver before he arrived in Russia.

In 2016, Tabatabaei and Mosavi published a paper in a journal owned by a Russian defense company that builds navigation systems for the navy. In the paper, they proposed an algorithm for detecting GPS spoofing attacks and said they had built a fake signal to test how well it worked.

Tabatabaei is not the only Iranian scientist linked to this Russian lab. Others include student Shervin Behzad Far, researcher Zainab Koohi, and Professor Hadi Shahriar Shahhosseini, a senior official at Tabatabaei's university in Tehran.

In 2021, Russian state media outlet Sputnik published an interview with Seyed Hassan Zabihifar, an Iranian graduate of Moscow’s Bauman State Technical University. He described international sanctions on Iran as “oppressive,” saying the freezing of Iranian assets abroad had left fewer funds to buy parts for his robotics work.

Bauman is one of the leading Russian research and development centers for the application of artificial intelligence to drone technology. In 2026, scientists at this university published a monograph on computer vision for precise autonomous control of unmanned aerial vehicles, which mentions technologies typical of military drones, such as automatic systems for target detection and tracking.

University staff also publishes papers on autonomous navigation based on artificial intelligence, both for drones and ground robots.

Zabihifar spent 2014–2018 studying in Moscow, where he and his professor used pendulum models to develop adaptive neural control algorithms, a way to help stabilize unstable systems, which could be applied to drones and other unmanned vehicles.

During his stay in Moscow, Zabihifar and his colleagues from the university where he studied in Iran developed a control algorithm for an unmanned underwater vehicle. Such autonomous robots are used in both civilian oceanography and military applications, such as reconnaissance and surveillance.

After graduating, Zabihfar worked for state-controlled Russian companies, including a bank. In 2023, he returned to Iran, where he now works as an associate professor at the University of Science and Technology.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered a new wave of US sanctions on Russian universities. MAI was targeted in 2022 for purchasing American goods in support of the Russian military and in 2024 for training personnel for Russia's military industry.

The United States and the European Union also imposed sanctions on other Russian universities for similar reasons, including Bauman.

In 2025, the Pentagon added these universities, along with several others, to a blacklist that prohibits security contracts and cooperation with designated entities./REL