The Guardian story aims at implicating Iran in arms smuggling to Russia

The Russian embassy in Tehran has dismissed media allegations that Iranian weapons are being sent to Russia to be used in the Ukraine war as "false".

"The information that circulated in the media about the delivery of Iranian weaponry to Russia is false and does not match with reality," the embassy tweeted.

The Guardian reported earlier this month that Russia was using weaponry smuggled from Iraq by Iran against Ukraine.

The Iranian embassy in London had earlier dismissed the report as "unprofessional and unfounded".

The Guardian report said, “Russia is receiving munitions and military hardware sourced from Iraq for its war effort in Ukraine with the help of Iranian weapons smuggling networks, according to members of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias and regional intelligence services with knowledge of the process”

It even went on to say that RPGs and anti-tank missiles as well as Brazilian-designed rocket launcher systems “have been dispatched to Russia from Iraq as Moscow’s campaign has faltered in the last month.”

An Iranian-made Bavar 373 missile system, similar to the Russian S-300, has also been donated to Moscow by the authorities in Tehran, who also returned an S-300, according to a source who helped organize the transport, the report claimed.

Assuming that the first three paragraphs were not ridiculous enough, the report became funnier when it said, “Using the weapons-trafficking underworld would signal a dramatic shift in Russian strategy, as Moscow is forced to lean on Iran, its military ally in Syria, following new sanctions triggered by the invasion of Ukraine.
The developments also have huge implications for the direction and volume of trade in the international weapons trafficking business.”

Using the weapons-trafficking underworld signals a dramatic shift in Russian strategy, as Moscow is forced to lean on Iran, its military ally in Syria, following new sanctions triggered by the invasion of Ukraine. The developments also have huge implications for the direction and volume of trade in the international weapons trafficking business.

Iraq has hosted US and western troops since the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the US has trained and supplied various Iraqi army and Special Forces units to defend the Baghdad government against insurgencies. After two decades of war, the country is awash with weaponry.

Much of it has passed legally into the hands of Iran-backed Shia militias, which are opposed to the US presence in the country, but since 2016 have been officially incorporated into the Iraqi armed forces as part of the fight against Islamic State.

RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and anti-tank missiles in the possession of Hashd al-Shaabi, the most powerful Shia militia umbrella, were transported to Iran through the Salamja border crossing on 26 March, where they were received by the Iranian military and taken on to Russia by sea, said a commander of the militia branch that controls the crossing.