Russia intends to provide advanced military components to Iran in exchange for hundreds of drones, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said on Tuesday, Reuters reported.

“Iran has become one of Russia’s most important military sponsors,” Wallace said in a statement to parliament on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

“In exchange for providing more than 300 kamikaze drones, Russia now plans to provide advanced military components to Iran, undermining both the Middle East and international security,” the British defense secretary said.

Earlier on Tuesday, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, told Iran’s foreign minister that Tehran must immediately end its military support to Russia.

Iran has admitted supplying drones to Moscow, but says they were sent to the war in Ukraine, where Russia used them to target power plants and civilian infrastructure.

Britain, the United States and the European Union have imposed sanctions on Iran’s military and defense equipment manufacturers believed to be involved in the supply of Iranian drones to Russia.

Indeed, on December 9, British UN Ambassador Barbara Woodward said that Russia was trying to get more weapons from Iran, including hundreds of ballistic missiles, and in return was offering Tehran an unprecedented level of military and technical support.

Woodward also said that since August, Iran has transferred hundreds of drones — unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — to Russia, which has used them to “kill civilians and illegally target civilian infrastructure” in Ukraine.

We will remind, according to the investigation conducted by Reuters and iStories, the Russian mass media, in cooperation with the Royal United Services Institute, a defense analytical center in London, the Center for Special Technologies in St. Petersburg, which produces Orlan. -10 drones, still receives Western components to make these unmanned vehicles despite the sanctions, through a logistics chain that includes middlemen in the United States, China and Russia.

So the hundreds of Russian drones flying ominously over Ukraine owe their existence to a sanctions-evading supply chain that often runs through a shabby office above a market in Hong Kong and sometimes through a house in suburban Florida.