Nuclear Royalties: How Could Russia Have Paid Iran for the “Shaheds”?

On 10 March 2023, a delegation from Alabuga — the Russian special economic zone in Tatarstan where Shahed strike drones are built under Iranian licence — flew from Moscow to Tehran. Among the passengers were two men whose fields have nothing to do with unmanned aircraft.

The first was Dmitry Shubnyakov, a Russian engineer formally hired by Alabuga as a digital electronics software engineer, assigned to the division that, in the company’s internal terminology, manufactures ‘motorboats’ (the code name for Russian-made Shaheds – 1, 2, 3). Yet Shubnyakov had spent his entire career working on nuclear infrastructure: spent fuel management, weapons-grade plutonium facilities and the robotics used to service them. Ten days before the flight, his name appeared among the inventors on an application filed with Iran’s national patent register — for equipment that detects and repairs leaks in the pools where nuclear power plants store spent fuel.

The second was a passenger recorded under the name Saeed Darki. An Iranian researcher of the same name lives in Yekaterinburg, where he works and studies at Ural Federal University. His publications concern metal forming — a technology used in containers for storing nuclear fuel. Two years later, in July 2025, a person of that name would receive a payment from Alabuga.

But why would a drone manufacturer pay specialists whose expertise lies in the nuclear field? Analysts at the Molfar Intelligence Institute traced both men through Alabuga’s payroll records for the period in which Russia was acquiring Iranian drone technology, in order to establish whether these payments might be connected — if not to a transfer of nuclear technology, a claim that would require considerably stronger evidence, then to royalties for their inventions and research.

An engineer out of place

Dmitry Shubnyakov grew up in Desnogorsk, the satellite town of the Smolensk nuclear power plant (1, 2), where he began his professional career. From at least 2012 he worked at the Special Design and Technology Bureau of Applied Robotics, SKTB PR (1, 2) — a Moscow design bureau whose work began with the creation of remotely operated systems for the clean-up of the Chornobyl disaster.

The first two entries on SKTB PR’s client list are Rosatom and the Russian Ministry of Defence, and as of April 2025 (1, 2) the company appeared in a classified Russian register of defence-industrial organisations. Between 2015 and 2018, SKTB PR received state contracts from four structures controlled by Rosatom. Two of them develop nuclear weapons (1, 2, 3, 4), their components or munitions. The third specialises in decommissioning industrial uranium-graphite reactors (1, 2) — reactors of the type originally designed to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

Shubnyakov was not a minor figure. In describing the project from which his patents emerged, he refers to himself as the lead specialist, in charge of a team of sixty.

The patents themselves are the key link in this story. During his time at SKTB PR, Shubnyakov became a co-author of three patents for a robotic system to repair the liner of a spent nuclear fuel storage pool. Two were registered in Russia (1, 2); the third combined both technologies within a single international application. The co-owners include SKTB PR and enterprises controlled by Rosatom. Following international publication, the combined patent was submitted for national registration in several countries.

A patent is valid only where it has been registered. An international application confers no rights in itself — it opens a window during which the invention can be filed for registration in specific countries. Until that is done, anyone in Iran may use the technology free of charge. Once registered, the patent holder acquires a monopoly on it in that country, and with it the legal basis to sell licences and collect royalties for its use.

Iran was one of the countries selected for such registration — the very application after which, ten days later, Shubnyakov flew to Tehran.

Spent fuel storage pools are not a purely civilian technology. The liner leakage problem that Shubnyakov’s patent addresses is documented in the history of Soviet reactors used to produce weapons-grade plutonium. And it was precisely over concerns about the separation of plutonium from spent fuel that, in 2005, the United States secured an agreement between Russia and Iran obliging all spent fuel from Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant to be returned to Russia. The technology patented by Shubnyakov concerns solutions to problems associated with the safe storage of spent fuel in cooling pools — and therefore sits within the context of those same concerns.

A post that does not explain the payments

In January 2023, Shubnyakov was taken on in two positions at once within Alabuga’s Motorboat Production Support Department: senior software engineer for navigation systems (the ‘Navigation System’ module) and senior digital electronics software engineer for the flight control unit (the ‘Digital Electronics (FCU)’ module). He was dismissed from the first as early as April 2023, while he continued to draw income from the FCU post for at least two years, until the summer of 2025.

Over the same period, Shubnyakov headed a manufacturer of specialised vehicles outside Moscow, held paid positions at several other firms and maintained his ties with SKTB PR. In March 2025 he went so far as to publish his CV openly, seeking work as a lead engineer in the Moscow region.

Alabuga’s records also list Shubnyakov’s son, Georgy, as a lead specialist in the FCU group. In October 2024, during working hours, he was stopped by police in Belgorod Oblast (1, 2) over problems with his licence — more than a thousand kilometres from the production site where he was supposed to be.

Thus, Dmytro Shubnyakov continued to receive payments for his position in Tatarstan for more than two years. During this period, he ran businesses in several companies near Moscow and was also looking for work there.

An Iranian researcher from Yekaterinburg

Shubnyakov was formally employed by Alabuga in a permanent position, with a designated module, department and date of employment. The entry for Saeed Darki contains none of this: no post, no division — only a name and a passport number in Iranian format. This is how one-off contract work is recorded, not an employee.

Darki has lived since roughly 2019 in Yekaterinburg, a city in a region with a long nuclear history. The first Soviet uranium enrichment plant began operating in neighbouring Novouralsk (1, 2) as early as 1949.

On paper, Darki’s speciality is far removed from the nuclear field. He is a co-author of at least seven papers (1, 2, 3) in mechanical engineering, materials science and metal forming; his research concerns radial forging and the manufacture of seamless tubes in particular.

One of Darki’s co-authored papers deals with the manufacture of seamless tubes by piercing and with the properties of the resulting product. The subject matter is further confirmed by the fact that it is indexed in INIS, the IAEA’s abstract database on nuclear topics. Seamless tubes of the type it describes are used in nuclear power, including in containers for storing nuclear fuel.

Among those citing Darki’s work are researchers at Iranian universities. Five of them have been identified from their ResearchGate profiles (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Some are researchers whose own work touches on nuclear subjects, and others are affiliated with universities (1, 2) involved in Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes.

In July 2025, the US-based Institute for Science and International Security published a list of eleven Iranian nuclear scientists who had been killed. At least three of them held doctorates obtained in Russia. Some were affiliated with universities whose representatives travelled to Russia in November 2024 to acquire laser technologies and expertise that could have helped verify the design of a nuclear weapon. One of the researchers killed had cited Darki’s work.

A citation is not direct evidence of collaboration: academic papers are cited by hundreds of people with whom the author has never had any contact. But it does map out the field in which a person whose name surfaced in Alabuga’s records is working. An alumnus of one of these universities, who subsequently collaborated with the institution, cited Darka’s article in an academic paper published in 2022.

How Russia paid for the Shaheds

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Iran began supplying Shahed drones, and the two sides subsequently agreed to localise production in Russia (1, 2, 3), at the Alabuga site. Leaked material from Sahara Thunder, the Iranian front company sanctioned by the US Treasury, documents the contracts, the component deliveries and the increasingly convoluted schemes by which Russia paid for them.

Payment was a persistent problem: Iran refused to accept roubles, and Russia was short of dollars in cash. The two sides improvised — first with gold, some two tonnes of which was handed over by the spring of 2023, and then through an intermediary company in the UAE, Generation Trading FZE, which issued invoices via the Dubai branch of an Iranian bank, with contracts backdated to provide legal cover. The documented list of payment methods is a broad one: dollars, roubles, euros, dirhams, rials, yuan, gold — ‘and other property’.

What does a buyer offer once gold is no longer wanted? This is one of the central questions of this investigation.

It is at this phrase — ‘and other property’ — that the nuclear thread returns to the story. As early as late 2022, Ukrainian intelligence reported that, in exchange for Iranian missiles, Russia had offered unspecified ‘technologies’ for Iran’s military industry. Researchers at C4ADS, analysing the same leaks, concluded in 2025 that the cooperation had outlived the drone project and spread into other sectors of the defence industry.

MII’s finding poses a narrower question: were Shubnyakov’s invention and Darki’s research among the technologies on offer — and were Alabuga’s payments a form of royalty rather than a salary?

If the formal employment was merely a wrapper, the payments require a different explanation. The most restrained is this: Alabuga, which received state funding to localise Shahed production, a loan to develop it, and later sold the finished drones to the state, was a natural vehicle through which to channel the cost of a technology transfer. Royalties to Shubnyakov for his invention and contract payments to Darki for his research would fit into the project’s books as production costs.

MII’s records cover several tens of thousands of individuals who received payments from Alabuga between 2023 and 2025. Only a small fraction of them have been checked — so other nuclear scientists may well be among the rest.

Methodology and limitations of the research

This investigation is built on circumstantial evidence: no single document records the transfer of a nuclear technology, but the chronology of events shows a series of coincidences consistent with a wider body of facts documented by independent Western media. It is the accumulation of those coincidences, rather than any one of them, that is the subject of this publication.

The research draws on leaked datasets (material from the Sahara Thunder server and the leaked correspondence of Alexey Florov), publicly verifiable records (patent applications with WIPO and in Russian registers, OFAC sanctions designations, Russian corporate registers, academic citation databases), earlier work by C4ADS, Reuters, the Financial Times, Protokol and InformNapalm, as well as a number of details from insider sources that MII treats as leads pending confirmation.

What MII does not claim. MII has not established that any nuclear technology was in fact transferred to Iran, nor that Alabuga’s payments to Shubnyakov and Darki were unambiguously royalties. The data available to the researchers on crossings of the Russian border covers only the period up to mid-2023, and the personnel records only up to the summer of 2025; both sources are incomplete. Several links in this chain rest on isolated sources. The connection set out here is a reasoned hypothesis, built on coincidence in time, the profile of the expertise involved and the documented context; it is offered to other journalists and researchers as a thread worth pulling, not as a closed case.