Iran armed Russia with Shaheds. Now it wants the jet-powered Geran-5 remake back to fight Israel and the US

Russia has upgraded the Iranian Shahed it fires at Ukraine into jet-powered drones that Iran now wants back, the Financial Times reported. Tehran plans to use them in its own war against Israel and the United States, the paper reported, citing Western intelligence.

Russia now fights with weapons it churns out and revises mid-fight, a homegrown production model fast enough to turn a cheap imported airframe into something its original supplier now wants back.

From a 185 km/h propeller drone to a jet that looks like a missile

Russia started building the Geran, its own version of Iran's Shahed, in 2023. The first Geran-1 flew at up to 185 km/h with a 20-kilogram warhead. The newest Geran-5 flies at up to 600 km/h, carries a 90-kilogram warhead, and has a range of up to 1,000 km. Newer models add thermal cameras, AI-assisted guidance, Russian anti-jamming antennas, and Chinese mesh modems.

Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov, a non-staff adviser to Ukraine's president on defense technology, has described how such drones work:

"A Russian operator flies at an altitude of 2–5 km, spots the target, locks onto it using the camera, and then the Shahed automatically attacks the target."

Almost all of Russia's jet drones used against Ukraine carry such a camera, he added.

Skipping the testing, straight to combat

Centralized production lets the Kremlin redesign fast and fold in combat lessons.

"The reason Russia was able to create a major new production line from scratch was because it's technologically a lot simpler than making something like tanks, which require enormous, unique and costly machine tools," said Ruslan Pukhov, who heads the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.

He added that they essentially skipped the long testing period that usually accompanies any military development process, with changes going straight into production and being checked in combat.