April 14, 2025: Like most western militaries, Russia has become dependent on the use of missiles and drones instead of artillery and airstrikes. Ukraine reports that from late 2022 through late 2024 Russia used 4,800 missiles and nearly 15,000 attack drones. The missiles are expensive, most costing one or two million dollars each, while some of the drones cost $35,000, for the Iranian Shahed design. More recent drone designs cost only a few hundred dollars each. It was thought that the inexpensive drones would replace the use of 155mm artillery. The range and cost of artillery shells varies from $3,000 to $100,000 depending on its version and purpose. The basic 155mm shell weighs 43 kg and contains about seven kg of explosives. The standard Russian equivalent is the 152mm shell.

The only Russian source of weapons and munitions has been Iran and North Korea, which has a feeble economy with a GDP of only $30 billion and has long been subject to economic sanctions. Iran, which is also sanctioned but has oil to export and a GDP of over $400 billion. Iran was also responsible for the recent completion of a drone manufacturing facility on the Volga River. Russia has over fifty firms manufacturing over two dozen types of drones. These include three dozen different models, most of them with a range of 40 kilometers while about a dozen have ranges of 100 to 2,000 kilometers.

Russia is building a drone manufacturing infrastructure. By 2026 330,000 people will be involved in the development, production, and operation of drones by 2026. By 2035 1.5 million people may be involved in drone design, development and production.

Russia continues to obtain drones and drone construction assistance from Iran. While Russia produces 330-350 Shahed-136 drones per month, Iran also helps out. Russia has manufactured over 2,000 Shahed drones and at least 2,600 have been sent by Iran.

To cooperate with Iran, Russia uses an existing north-south trade route to Iran. Russia wants to improve it with road and rail connections. Railway connections are a problem because Russia and Iran railroads use different railroad gauges. That can be overcome by building parallel Iran/Russian rail lines and establishing depots where cargoes, especially standard shipping containers, can be transferred between Russian and Iranian trains. Road building bypasses the rail gauge problem. While trucks have long transported shipping containers, it is three times more expensive to ship by road than by rail. Shipping by sea is less than 20 percent the cost of rail transport. The road and rail lines are essential for getting cargo to inland destinations, but most of the tonnage is moved the longest distances by ship. For this reason Russia has long maintained a water route from Russia to Iran via the Caspian Sea and a series of canals. In 2023 Russia brought in dredging equipment for a major, and overdue, dredging of the heavily used Volga-Don Canal that enables ships to get from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea. Because of the war in Ukraine, and Iran supplying weapons and equipment to Russia, canal traffic was up 15 percent in 2022 over the previous year. In 2023 traffic increased by another 4.5 percent and increased further in 2024.

Since 1952 a 101 kilometers long canal, linking the Don and Volga rivers, gave the Caspian Sea access to the Black Sea and the world's oceans. Ships that can use the canal cannot displace more than 5,000 tons, be no more than 140 meters long, 17 meters wide, and have a draft of more than 3.5 meters. Normally the canal moves over 12 million tons of cargo a year. About half of that is oil or oil products. In 2021 Russia agreed to allow Iran to use the Volga-Don Canal so that Iranian ships can reach the Black Sea from the landlocked Caspian Sea. This is the first time Russia has ever given a foreign nation free access to the canal. Russia and Iran are now using each other’s Caspian Sea ports heavily for trade and getting Iranian weapons to Russia. Both nations have agreed to establish a joint-shipbuilding operation in the Caspian Sea and cooperate in dredging the canal, something that has not been done since 1991. The prolonged lack of dredging has made portions of the canal shallower and forced ships to carry less cargo.

The 13 locks on the canal connect the Volga River, the longest in Russia that empties into the Caspian, and the Don River which empties into the Sea of Azov, which is connected to the Black Sea via the Kerch Strait. The Caspian is the world's largest lake, at 371,000 square kilometers. It is about a thousand kilometers long and 430 kilometers wide. It's saline but is only about a third as salty as ocean water. The Caspian has a 7,000-kilometer-long coastline, with the largest chunk, 1,900 kilometers, belonging to Kazakhstan.