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• Russia establishes drone factory in China
• Russian arms firm develops UAVs for use in Ukraine
• China-made drones have been delivered to Russia
• Chinese government says it is not aware of such a project

Russia has established a weapons programme in China to develop and produce long-range attack drones for use in the war against Ukraine, according to two sources from a European intelligence agency and documents.

IEMZ Kupol, a subsidiary of Russian state-owned weapons company Almaz-Antey, has developed and flight-tested a new drone model called Garpiya-3 (G3) in China with the help of local specialists, according to one of the documents, a report that Kupol sent to the Russian defence ministry earlier this year outlining its work.

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Fabian Hinz, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based defence think-tank, said the delivery of UAVs from China to Russia, if confirmed, would be a significant development.

“If you look at what China is known to have delivered so far, it was mostly dual-use goods - it was components, sub-components, that could be used in weapon systems,” he [said]. “This is what has been reported so far. But what we haven’t really seen, at least in the open source, are documented transfers of whole weapon systems.”

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David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who heads the Institute for Science and International Security research group and has conducted extensive work on Chinese and Russian cooperation on drone production, told Reuters that Kupol could skirt Western sanctions on Russia by setting up a production facility in China where it could access advanced chips and expertise.

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Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said his military had received around 140,000 drones in 2023 and that Moscow planned to increase this number tenfold this year.

“Whoever reacts faster to demands on the battlefield wins,” he told a meeting in St Petersburg about drone production.