Several senior Russian missile specialists have visited Iran over the past year as the Islamic Republic deepened its defense cooperation with Moscow, a review of travel records and employment data indicates.
The seven weapons experts were booked to travel from Moscow to Tehran aboard two flights on April 24 and Sept. 17 last year, according to documents detailing the two group bookings as well as the passenger manifest for the second flight.
The booking records include the men’s passport numbers, with six of the seven having the prefix “20.” That denotes a passport used for official state business, issued to government officials on foreign work trips and military personnel stationed abroad, according to an edict published by the Russian government and a document on the Russian foreign ministry’s website.
It could not be determined what the seven were doing in Iran.
A senior Iranian defense ministry official said Russian missile experts had made multiple visits to Iranian missile production sites last year, including two underground facilities, with some of the visits taking place in September. The official, who requested anonymity to discuss security matters, didn’t identify the sites.
A Western defense official, who monitors Iran’s defense cooperation with Russia and also requested anonymity, said an unspecified number of Russian missile experts visited an Iranian missile base, about 15 kilometers west of the port of Amirabad on Iran’s Caspian Sea coast, in September.
It could not be established if the visitors referred to by the officials included the Russians on the two flights.
The seven Russians identified all have senior military backgrounds, with two ranked colonel and two lieutenant-colonel, according to a review of Russian databases containing information about citizens’ jobs or places of work, including tax, phone and vehicle records.
Two are experts in air-defense missile systems, three specialize in artillery and rocketry, while one has a background in advanced weapons development and another has worked at a missile-testing range, the records showed. It is not known whether all are still working in those roles as the employment data ranged from 2021 to 2024.
Their flights to Tehran came at a precarious time for Iran, which found itself drawn into a tit-for-tat battle with arch-foe Israel that saw both sides mount military strikes on each other in April and October.
When all the men were contacted by phone, five of them either said they had not been to Iran, denied they worked for the military, or both; one declined to comment; and one hung up.
Iran’s defense and foreign ministries declined to comment for this article, as did the public relations office of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite force that oversees Iran’s ballistic missile program. The Russian defense ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Cooperation between the two countries, whose leaders signed a 20-year military pact in Moscow in January, has already influenced Russia’s war on Ukraine, with large numbers of Iranian-designed Shahed drones deployed on the battlefield.
A S-300 missile system is displayed on a street in Tehran during Iranian defense week on Sept. 24, 2024.
| WANA (West Asia News Agency) / via REUTERS
A S-300 missile system is displayed on a street in Tehran during Iranian defense week on Sept. 24, 2024.
| WANA (West Asia News Agency) / via REUTERS
The flight booking information for the seven travelers was presented by Hooshyaran-e Vatan, a group of activist hackers opposed to the Iranian government. The hackers said the seven were traveling with VIP status.
The information was corroborated with the Russian passenger manifest for the September flight, which was provided by a source with access to Russian state databases. The manifest for the earlier flight could not be accessed, so it could not be verified whether the five Russian specialists booked on it actually made the trip.
Denis Kalko, 48, and 46-year-old Vadim Malov were among the five Russian weapons experts whose seats were booked as a group on the April flight, the records showed.
Kalko worked at the defense ministry’s Academy for Military Anti-Aircraft Defense, tax records for 2021 show. Malov worked for a military unit that trains anti-aircraft missile forces, according to car ownership records for 2024.
Andrei Gusev, 45, Alexander Antonov, 43, and Marat Khusainov, 54, were also booked on the April flight. Gusev is a lieutenant-colonel who works as deputy head of the faculty of General Purpose Rockets and Artillery Munitions at the defense ministry’s Penza Artillery Engineering Institute, according to a 2021 news item on the institute’s website. Antonov has worked at the Main Rocket and Artillery Directorate of the defence ministry, according to car registration records from 2024, while bank data shows Khusainov, a colonel, has worked at the Kapustin Yar missile-testing range.
One of the two passengers onboard the second flight to Tehran in September was Sergei Yurchenko, 46, who has also worked at the Rocket and Artillery Directorate, according to undated mobile phone records. His passport number had the prefix “22.” It could not be determined what that signified, though, according to the government edict on passports, it isn’t used for private citizens or diplomats.
The other passenger on the September flight was 46-year-old Oleg Fedosov. Residence records give his address as the office of the Directorate of Advanced Inter-Service Research and Special Projects. That is a branch of the defense ministry tasked with developing weapons systems of the future.
Fedosov had previously flown from Tehran to Moscow in October 2023, according to Russian border crossing records. On that occasion, as he did for the September 2024 flight, Fedosov used his passport reserved for official state business, the records showed.
