China is now openly shipping the engines, computer chips, gyroscopes, and fiber-optic cables that Russia and Iran need to keep their drone and missile factories running. The components have killed hundreds of Ukrainian civilians and damaged 228 U.S. military targets across the Middle East — far more destruction than Washington has publicly acknowledged. Beijing has stopped pretending it isn’t happening.
China Is Fueling the Iran and Ukraine Wars
DF-17 Missile from China. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Manila, Philippines – According to a lengthy investigative report in the Wall Street Journal, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is now supplying almost all the materials necessary for both Russia and Iran to continue production of drones and ballistic missiles on a massive scale.
Among these are the now-infamous Shahed series of one-way drones that have killed hundreds of Ukrainian civilians to date.
According to data from the PRC’s Customs Service, Chinese companies are now reported to be shipping hundreds of containers of the full complement of items required to manufacture these drones. The shipments are today headed for Russia and Iran and are openly transported in massive numbers. The items listed on the PRC Customs documents include drone engines, computer chips, fiber-optic cables, and gyroscopes.
The investigation also reveals that Chinese suppliers today feel so emboldened that they no longer make any effort to mask the destinations of these shipments.
These items are forbidden for export to both countries due to US and European Union (EU) sanctions, but the responsibility of various nations to stop them appears to have been ignored. Initially, the PRC exporters had been relabelling the shipments, but according to both US Treasury Department officials and analysts of the arms trade, that practice has been discontinued.
“The Chinese have dispensed with the fiction that they are ‘not involved in the Ukraine conflict,” said a drone company and anti-drone defense executive in Kyiv who spoke to National Security Journal.
Iran’s Drones That Russia Is Using. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
“As with many aspects of this conflict, attempting to enforce these sanctions, impose fines on those responsible, etc. – it’s just like the situation with the Russian shadow fleet of oil tankers that should not be allowed to deliver their shipments but do every day anyway.”
“That enforcement falls into that category of ‘real work’, which no one can be bothered with. The standard excuse you hear from people in Washington is ‘these drone components are in the category of openly available commercial components, and it is too hard to control their sales.’ So, the Chinese know they can flout these sanctions, but in the end, nothing will happen to them.”
“Not Really Our Problem”
“If the US president, Donald Trump, were as serious as he says about trying to create peace and stability in the world, as he says, the PRC would be number one on his hit list of countries to be sanctioned for what they are doing to fuel the destruction created by these weapons,” said a retired US military intelligence officer and an expert on the PRC.
“When Xi [Jinping] calls him and says, ‘hey let’s have a summit’, Trump’s response ought to be ‘until you stop fuelling the breakneck expansion of the production of these deadly unmanned systems and cut off supplies to Russia and Iran, we do not have anything to talk about’,” he continued.
Image Credit: Creative Commons. Image is of a Russian missile being tested.
“Some have been saying that antagonizing the Chinese in this manner is not in the interests of the US, but now those chickens are coming home to roost. Those drone components shipped by the PRC are not just killing Ukrainian civilians anymore. They are hitting bases in the Middle East, destroying millions in US military equipment, killing US military personnel, and the servicemen of our allies. You cannot sit there any longer and naively say ‘this is not really our problem’.”
A Washington Post report today based on analysis of satellite imagery finds that Iranian drone and missile strikes “have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at US military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defense equipment…The amount of destruction is far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the US government or previously reported.”
Misaligned Sanctions Regimes
One of the assessments in the report almost falls into the same category as generals who are always preparing to fight the last war, not the one they are likely to be engaged in in the near future. What that means in this instance is that much of the traffic in drone components and the other items required to manufacture these weapons is not really on the radar of those institutions that have been engaged in sanctions enforcement for decades.
In the past, sanctions on the trade in weapon system components have focused on those technologies and items that would facilitate the design of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Those are sophisticated items produced with high-tech machinery, with very few companies capable of making them. They are also usually manufactured in small quantities, which makes tracking their sales and where they are being shipped relatively simple.
But the low-cost, commercial-off-the-shelf items that the Chinese provide to Russian and Iranian drone factories are made by more companies than imaginable. Those monitoring the shippers always use the excuse that there are dozens – if not hundreds – of non-military commercial applications for these items.
But there is a crossover point in this sanctions war. Not all the items fall into the “too hard to keep track of” category.
A January 2026 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reveals that the PRC supplied more complicated and higher-technology dual-use materials and industrial equipment. These shipments ultimately enabled Russia to significantly increase its production of Iskander-M ballistic missiles.
The report also said that items shipped by Beijing for export included ammonium perchlorate, a primary ingredient in solid-fuel rocket motors, as well as precision machine tools, microprocessors, and lithium batteries, in addition to drone-related components that are production inputs across Russia’s missile and UAV programs.
“These are items that should be far easier to follow the trail of despite all the complaining about how they are too difficult to keep track of,” said the retired US intelligence officer. “Continuing to allow the Chinese to ship these items, whether it is directly to Russia and Iran or through third parties in India, Thailand, Belarus, etc., or pretending it is not happening is only going to come back and bite us – like it already has, but it will be worse later.”
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two consecutive awards for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
