U.S. intelligence assessments, reported since March 2026 by anonymous U.S. and European intelligence officials speaking to the Washington Post, AP, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal, have provided a wealth of evidence to assess that Russia has likely transferred upgraded components and even versions of the Shahed drone family, along with targeting information, to support Iranian and IRGC operations against U.S. forces in the Middle East and its Gulf allies.
In addition, on 2 March 2026, a Shahed-type one-way attack drone struck RAF Akrotiri, a British Sovereign Base Area on Cyprus. Wreckage recovered from the strike contained a Kometa-M satellite navigation module which is manufactured by the U.S. sanctioned firm AO VNIIR-Progress based in Cheboksary and St. Petersburg.
The unit is a controlled-reception-pattern antenna array designed to defeat GPS jamming. This module has been documented repeatedly in Russian Geran-2 drones recovered on Ukrainian territory. Its presence in the Akrotiri wreckage is a forensic finding, examined by British authorities on British sovereign territory, a Five Eyes partner, and independent of any other intelligence assessments.
Some of the upgrades to Shahed that Russia made include hardened anti-jam arrays, terrain-contour-matching, and in some airframes, either FPV-style, man-in-the-loop terminal control or autonomous electro-optical terminal seekers for targeting in the final approach. These modifications originate from Russian battlefield engineering and are not linked to legacy Shahed designs.
The direction of the Shahed pipeline has reversed. Russia now exports its own combat-refined version of that technology, and reportedly targeting information as well, back to Iran, the country that supplied the original design, which is now using the technology to target Americans and regional allies.