In 2000, Iranian Ali Mohammad Amouei finished his studies at the Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI), a leading Russian technical university focused on aerospace and rocket engineering. His expertise is in gas turbine engines -- the kind used to power airliners and fighter jets, but also cruise missiles and drones.
Back in Iran, Amouei began climbing the ranks of the aviation industry, according to his LinkedIn page. By 2017, he had become a senior executive at Farsco, a company whose owners include Mahan Air, an airline the United States had already sanctioned over ties to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
In 2020, Washington imposed sanctions on Farsco itself, accusing it of illegally acquiring American-made helicopters.
Mohammad Hosseinpour Khanmiri returned to Iran in 2022 after several years in Russia, where he had started studying at St. Petersburg State University in 2015.
He and his adviser there, senior researcher Roman Bogdanov, developed a method for measuring uranium and thorium isotope ratios in natural mineral samples, a collaboration that was part of a broader partnership dating back to the early 1990s, when Russia began helping Iran build its nuclear power program and its sole nuclear power plant, Bushehr.
At home, Khanmiri used the method on ore from Saghand, Iran's main uranium deposit. Online references indicate he now works at Iran's Atomic Energy Organization or an affiliated nuclear research institute that has been hit with Western sanctions.
The educational and professional arcs of Amouei and Khanmiri are hardly one-of-a-kind: For decades, Russia has been training Iranian specialists and helping launch their scientific careers in fields that have practical applications in the defense industry and nuclear activities, creating a kind of dual-use pipeline between the countries.
An analysis by RFE/RL's Russian investigative unit, Systema , of published research over the past 10 years shows that Russia and Iran have continued to cooperate in areas of particular relevance to Iran's defense industry.
These now include not only traditional fields such as missile propulsion and uranium enrichment, but also technologies used in both Russia's war against Ukraine and the US-Israeli war with Iran, such as electronic warfare, GPS spoofing to mislead navigation systems, and artificial intelligence for drones.
"This has been a longstanding goal of the Iranians, to be able to have access to this information or any type of information," in the nuclear field but also "in other sensitive areas like AI, anything concerning aerospace," Nicole Grajewski, an expert at the Paris university Sciences Po and the author of a 2024 book on Russia-Iran relations.
"None of the Iranian research endeavors, especially with their PhD students that go abroad, are entirely apolitical," Grajewski told RFE/RL by phone. "Most of the time, they have some sort of connection to the government or some kind of ulterior motives."
The same goes for some Russian technical research institutes, she said, but added: "In general, Iran has been the country seeking more cooperation from Russia, as opposed to Russia going to Iran."
'Our Friends In Russia'
"In many cases, we have a certain degree of defense self-sufficiency," Mohammad Javad Zarif, then Iran's foreign minister, said in 2020. "In some cases, we have serious needs for arms cooperation with our friends in Russia and other countries."
The extent of the academic links has fluctuated with the geopolitical winds and the ups and downs of relations between Russia and Iran and their respective ties with the West. The number of Iranians studying at Russian universities has increased sharply since President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Russian-Iranian military-industrial ties are in the spotlight amid that war, now headed toward the five-year mark, and the US-Israeli war with Iran that broke out in February.
In addition to shells and other ammunition, Iran provided many of the drones used by Russia in the earlier stages of the full-scale invasion, and Russia is now churning out domestically made versions using the same technology. Experts say it's a two-way street: Moscow has also shared upgrades with Tehran.
Beyond that, Russia has reportedly provided Iran with intelligence and other information to help it target US assets in the Persian Gulf region during the war there. The Financial Times reported this month that Russia has secretly been helping Iran develop advanced supersonic cruise missiles since 2023.
Cooperation in rocket engineering began in the 1990s, when Russian institutes and companies assisted Iran in developing its first domestic ballistic missile.
As for aircraft engines, Iran has experience repairing them and manufacturing individual parts, but it has never mass-produced a full-size civilian jet engine. What it has mastered in this area is small gas turbine engines -- Amouei's specialty -- built for cruise missiles and drones.
Wartime Collaboration
As Amouei moved deeper into Iran's defense-linked aviation world, he never stopped publishing with his old contacts in Russia. In 2016, he co-authored a paper on protective coatings for turbine blades with other Iranians and a teacher at MAI. In 2021, he published again -- this time under the banner of an Iranian university linked to the Defense Technology and Science Research Center, which is tied directly to Iran's Defense Ministry.
Israel bombed a campus related to the same network in 2025, and the US military has linked it to Iran's nuclear program.
It is not clear if Amouei had a permanent position at the Iranian university. Systema attempted to contact him and the other Iranians who studied in Russia and are referred to in this report, but none of them responded.
That 2021 paper had other names attached to it, including that of Aleksei Boitsov, a department head at MAI who also advises Russian state defense and space giants Rostec and Roscosmos. Amouei wasn't the only Iranian scientist Boitsov trained: At least four others show up in the same body of research.
In 1999, a year before Amouei finished his studies in Russia, the United States slapped sanctions on a group of Russian universities suspected of helping Iran develop missile and nuclear technology, including MAI. They were lifted in 2010, during President Barack Obama's "reset" with Moscow and just three days after Russia and Washington agreed on a new joint sanctions package targeting Iran.
From the late 2000s through the early 2010s, military cooperation between Russia and Iran generally declined. But that changed after Putin returned to the presidency in 2012. In early 2015, Moscow and Tehran signed a new military cooperation agreement.
In the ensuing years, this kind of collaboration began to climb again, and it has jumped higher during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. By 2025, nearly 10,000 Iranians were studying at Russian universities, an increase of 42 percent from just two years earlier.
Joint papers by Russian and Iranian scientists remain rarer than those with European or American researchers, but that is changing, too. At some large technical universities, like ITMO in St. Petersburg, Iranian co-authors had nearly caught up with Germans by 2025 -- while before the full-scale war, Germany was St. Petersburg's top research partner.
Jamming And Spoofing
Documents reviewed by Systema demonstrated that academic researchers from Russia and Iran are also working together on GPS jamming and spoofing, technology that blocks or fakes GPS signals. Iran has used this since the early 2010s to defend against missile and drone strikes and confuse the navigation systems of enemy planes and ships.
Mohammad Reza Mosavi, an electrical engineering professor at Iran University of Science and Technology, is one of the country's most published GPS researchers.
In 2016, Mosavi co-wrote a paper with Stepan Shafran, a Russian scientist who heads the engineering track of a project developing radio navigation and communications technology. One of the project's partners is a company that makes the Orlan-10 drone, among other things, and was hit with US sanctions that same year for helping Russia's military intelligence agency, known as the GRU, with electronic spying.
In 2015, Amir Tabatabaei, a graduate student from a Tehran university, went to Russia to study at a lab founded by Kai Borre, a Danish satellite navigation expert who died in 2017, and based at Samara University, a major technical school about 860 kilometers from Moscow.
Tabatabaei's early research focused on GLONASS -- Russia's satellite positioning system, which Iran also uses to improve the accuracy of its ballistic missiles. His lab in Tehran already had a working GLONASS receiver before he arrived in Russia.
In 2016, Tabatabaei and Mosavi published a paper in a journal owned by a Russian defense company that builds navy navigation systems. In this article, they proposed an algorithm to detect GPS spoofing attacks and said they built a fake signal to test how well it worked.
Tabatabaei is not the only Iranian scientist connected to this Russian lab. Others include student Shervin Behzad Far, researcher Zainab Koohi, and Professor Hadi Shahriar Shahhosseini, a senior official at Tabatabaei's university in Tehran.
In 2021, state-run Russian media outlet Sputnik published an interview with Seyed Hassan Zabihifar, an Iranian graduate student at the prestigious Bauman Moscow State Technical University. He called international sanctions on Iran "oppressive," saying the freezing of Iranian assets abroad has left less funding to procure parts for his robotics work.
Bauman is one of Russia's leading research and development centers for applying artificial intelligence to drone technology. In 2026, scientists from this university published a monograph on computer vision for the precise autonomous control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that mentions technologies typical of military drones such as automatic target detection and tracking systems. University staff also publish papers on AI-based autonomous navigation, for both drones and ground robots.
Zabihifar spent 2014-18 studying in Moscow, where he and his professor used pendulum models to develop adaptive neural control algorithms, a way of helping stabilize unstable systems that can be applied to drones and other unmanned vehicles.
While in Moscow, Zabihifar and colleagues from his alma mater in Iran developed a control algorithm for an unmanned underwater vehicle. Such autonomous robots are used in both civilian oceanography and military applications such as reconnaissance.
After graduating, Zabihfar worked at Russian state-controlled companies including a bank. In 2023, he returned to Iran, where he now works as an associate professor at the University of Science and Technology.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered a new wave of US sanctions against Russian universities. MAI was targeted in 2022 for acquiring US goods in support of Russia's military and in 2024 for training personnel for its military industry.
The United States and EU also sanctioned other Russian universities for similar reasons, including Bauman. In 2025, the Pentagon added these universities, along with several others, to a blacklist prohibiting security contracts and collaboration with the designated entities.
