The State of War in Ukraine, and How it Connects to Iran

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Quick program note, tomorrow is the day before early voting begins in the New York primaries. And so we'll have our John Campbell on to talk about some of the big races. We've been having some of these candidate forums on the show. We'll talk about those and start to take your phone calls about who you're deciding to vote for in some of these hotly contested races. We'll also talk about some of the other races that we haven't gotten to. Also tomorrow, we'll preview the outstanding Supreme Court cases that we're waiting on. Today was a Supreme Court decision day, but none of the biggies came down.
You know, here, late June, it's the end of the term, and there are big decisions yet to come on birthright citizenship, TPS, temporary protected status for many immigrants, transgender athletes, all of that and more on tomorrow's Brian Lehrer Show.
Now, Ukraine has largely faded from American headlines, right? But the rest of the world is paying much closer attention than we are. As the Gulf states find themselves at war with Iran, they have turned to those with the most experience, with drone warfare in particular, and those are the leaders of Ukraine. And defense tech giants like Palantir are making the same pilgrimage, joining us to explain why is Francis Farrell, a reporter at the Kyiv Independent. Francis joins us from Kyiv. Hello from New York, Francis. Welcome to WNYC.

**Francis Farrell** (1:48)
Hi, Brian. From Kyiv. Good to be here.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:51)
And you write, just to dive right into the middle of this, that on top of its arsenal of ballistic missiles, Iran's weapon of choice is one that is all too familiar to Ukraine, the Shahed-type drone. What are you referring to there? Give people a one-on-one lesson on the Shahed-type drone.

**Francis Farrell** (2:10)
So, sure, yeah. The Shahed drone was invented by Iran. It's a one-way, very cheap, very simple, you could say loitering mission. It's a small, like, triangle-shaped suicide drone, which uses a basic petrol engine to fly for over hundreds of miles into a target. And there's a reason in Ukraine why we often call them mopeds, because that's what they sound like when you hear them outside your window. And in 2022, Russia basically not only bought a lot of these Shahed drones from Iran, but also acquired the license for them and started producing them inside Russia. And what they did was they used them together with their ballistic and cruise missiles to, in these big, mass attacks against Ukrainian cities, against Ukrainian infrastructure. And very quickly, Ukraine realized that if they use their very, you know, very precious and very expensive anti-air missile systems against these Shahed drones, which only cost about $50,000 each, then very quickly they're going to run out and there's going to be nothing to shoot down the drones, the missiles and their cities will be left undefended. And that's why Ukraine set up a completely different system for handling them. They shoot them down with machine guns from pickup trucks. And now they've been shooting them down with intercepted drones of their own.
In the meantime, Russia has been modifying these Shahed drones. They're now very different to the Iranian original. They have sometimes jet engines. They have mesh radio systems that speak to each other as they fly a lot more stealth attributes and just better specs.
But now when Iran has been using the original Shahed drone against countries all over the Gulf, it seems like the world, including the US, has not learned the same lesson that Ukraine learned way back almost four years ago.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:20)
In other words, when Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hecsef were boasting at the beginning of the war about destroying so much of Iran's military and so many of their missile sites and all of that, which may have been true, but the war continues largely because Iran had or has enough of these drones, right?

**Francis Farrell** (4:45)
Yeah, they're extremely cheap. They're extremely easy to mass produce. And Iran has the advantage of their mountainous terrain and they can easily hide the launch sites deep in bunkers and move them around. The same thing that Russia does.
And it's proved to be a very easy way of and a very cheap way of escalating the war, you know, reaching far across the region, you know, even hitting this British base in Cyprus. We remember that in the first few days of the war and closing the Strait of Hormuz. The same thing that Russia does basically, you know, with these almost nightly mass attacks all across Ukraine, even the very western areas, very, very far from the front line, are not safe always from these drones. But what Ukraine has done has understood that they need a systemic approach to counter. They need to use data to be able to track the way they fly, the patterns they fly in, where is the best place to set up your limited air defense assets, to be in the best place to catch these drones. And now the big innovation of the last year has been interceptor drones, which are very small, very cheap, but designed with a very specific purpose of hunting down these Shahed's mid-air. I've seen it happen in real time from the feeds that come from these drones. And now we see Russia having increasingly less success with them in their attacks. Meanwhile, Iran is using the very rudimentary model and having a lot of success because these countries haven't learned from Ukraine.