REUTERS

Russia has established a weapons programme in China to develop and produce long-range attack drones for use in the war against Ukraine, according to two sources from a European intelligence agency and documents reviewed by Reuters.

IEMZ Kupol, a subsidiary of Russian state-owned arms company Almaz-Antey, has developed and flight-tested a new drone model called Garpiya-3 (G3) in China with the help of local specialists, according to one of the documents, a report that Kupol sent to the Russian defence ministry earlier this year outlining its work.

Kupol told the defence ministry in a subsequent update that it was able to produce drones including the G3 at scale at a factory in China so the weapons could be deployed in the “special military operation” in Ukraine, the term Moscow uses for the war.

Kupol, Almaz-Antey and the Russian defence ministry did not respond to requests for comment for this article. China’s foreign ministry told Reuters it was not aware of such a project, adding that Beijing had strict control measures on the export of drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Fabian Hinz, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based defence think-tank, said the delivery of UAVs from China to Russia, if confirmed, would be a significant development.

“If you look at what China is known to have delivered so far, it was mostly dual-use goods - it was components, sub-components, that could be used in weapon systems,” he told Reuters. “This is what has been reported so far. But what we haven’t really seen, at least in the open source, are documented transfers of whole weapon systems.”

Still, Samuel Bendett, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank, said Beijing would be hesitant to open itself up to international sanctions for helping Moscow’s war machine.