China is helping Russia build a faster Shahed. Russia has begun using upgraded Shahed drones with Chinese-made turbojet engines that fly at speeds close to three times those of earlier versions, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The Shahed jet is designed to beat Ukraine's air defenses. Ukrainian interceptors have downed about 90 percent of the older piston-engine drones, which cruise at roughly 180 kilometers per hour, so Russia switched to the jet-powered Geran-4, which cruises at around 500 kilometers per hour.
The engines come from one Shenzhen firm
The turbojets come from Telefly Telecommunications Equipment, founded in Shenzhen in 2010. The company chiefly makes computer hardware and communications equipment, but also sells its own line of micro-turbojets for drones.
China has long been the main clearinghouse for Shahed parts, including engine components, servomotors, and gyroscopes, the newspaper reported.
The company scrubbed its own website
After Ukraine publicized the discovery of Telefly engines in Russian drones, the turbojet section disappeared from the English-language pages of the company's website. The pages in Chinese and other languages still carry them.
China's foreign ministry, which did not respond either, has previously said it strictly regulates exports of dual-use components and rejects unilateral US sanctions on such trade.
Western parts fade as Chinese parts arrive
Downed Shaheds once carried microcontrollers from Texas Instruments in the US and linear regulators from STMicroelectronics, which the newspaper lists as being based in Switzerland. Over time, the Western components are disappearing even as the drones gain better navigation and attack systems, because US Treasury investigations found nearly all the Western parts were being diverted through Chinese intermediaries, often shell companies in Hong Kong.
Ukrainian government researcher Colonel Oleksandr Zaruba said in June that Shaheds now hold more antennas, modems, and SIM cards to correct their flight paths through local mobile networks, and that the components increasingly come from China.
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