After two years of warnings that Iran was planning to supply missiles to Russia, the other shoe has dropped. Tehran has finally provided Moscow with Fath-360 close-range ballistic missiles (CRBMs), marking the Islamic Republic’s first-ever proliferation of missiles to the European continent. While the Fath-360 does not give Russia much in the way of new capability, it does pad Moscow’s missile stocks and complement Russia’s existing capabilities. The missile deal is also a harbinger of tighter Russo-Iranian ties, whose ramifications may extend well beyond Europe.

Missile Delivery

On September 10, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the U.S. Treasury Department confirmed that Iran had provided Fath-360 CRBMs to Russia. “Dozens of Russian military personnel have been trained in Iran” to operate the Fath-360 system, Blinken said. According to the Treasury, the training occurred in the summer of 2024 pursuant to a contract signed in “late 2023” for the delivery of “hundreds of missiles,” and the first shipment had arrived “as of early September.” Various media outlets, citing unnamed Ukrainian officials, reported that Russia received more than 200 Fath-360 missiles.

Back in August, European intelligence officials told Reuters that the Russian-Iranian contract, signed in Tehran on December 13, included not only the Fath-360 but also another CRBM called the Ababil. This missile, which Tehran first displayed during an arms expo in Moscow in 2023, has a shorter range and smaller warhead than the Fath-360. However, while the European officials said Iran had trained Russian personnel on the Fath-360, they provided no further information on the Ababil.

Moscow’s purchase of the Fath-360 is a bit of a plot twist, as some earlier press reports indicated Russia was interested in Iran’s Fateh-110 and Zolfaghar short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs). These missiles have longer ranges and carry larger payloads than the Fath-360. The Islamic Republic has used these or other SRBMs in most strikes launched from Iranian territory over the past decade. As Israeli officials have suggested, Tehran may have withheld these missiles due to concern about international backlash.

What We Know About the Fath-360 

In 2020, Iranian media began to hail the addition of CRBMs to the regime’s ballistic missile arsenal, which is the largest in the Middle East. These CRBMs, including the Fath-360, are derived from Tehran’s Fateh family of single-stage solid-propellant SRBMs. The CRBMs fill a critical gap in Iran’s inventory and have already seen action in the Middle East. In 2022, Iran fired an estimated seventy CRBMs against Kurdish civilian targets in Iraq, leading to the death of a U.S. citizen. Exporting these missiles to Russia, which assisted Iran’s ballistic missile program in the 1990s, is a boost for the Islamic Republic’s prestige. 

According to Blinken and the Iranian defense ministry, the Fath-360, also known as the BM-120, has a maximum range of 120 kilometers. Iranian sources say the missile carries a 150-kilogram unitary warhead, with options to swap out the standard blast-fragmentation warhead for airburst or bunker-buster variants. The missile reportedly uses satellite-aided inertial guidance. According to Iran’s defense ministry, the Fath-360 has a circular error probability of thirty meters. That is, half the missiles should land within thirty meters of their target—relatively inaccurate by modern standards.

Iran uses modified civilian trucks as transporter-erector launchers (TELs). They carry one to six missile canisters, which are either cylindrical or squared-off in shape. The TELs come with sliding covers that can disguise them as civilian vehicles. However, Iran has not provided Russia with TELs for its missiles, Reuters reported on September 21, citing U.S. and European officials. A “European intelligence official said without elaborating that they did not expect Iran to provide launchers,” the news agency stated.

It seems unlikely that Iran would agree to supply missiles but balk at providing the TELs. More plausibly, Russia decided to develop its own TEL. Moscow may have viewed the Iranian trucks as unsuitable due to their limited off-road mobility and poor protection for the crew. Presumably, Iran still provided the canisters and other related equipment, which will be mated to a Russian truck. This technical hurdle may explain why Russia has yet to employ the Fath-360 in Ukraine despite Blinken’s prediction that it would do so “within weeks.” 

How the Fath-360 Can Help Russia

The Fath-360 does not provide Russia with a dramatically different capability, but it does offer additional capacity. While Russian production of ballistic missiles and guided rockets likely has increased significantly since 2022, demand still outstrips supply. 

The Iranian missiles could free up Russia’s longer-range, more sophisticated munitions—particularly ballistic missiles fired by the Iskander-M system—for strikes against deeper or higher-priority targets, including critical infrastructure. Since March, Russian strikes have decimated Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure, and Moscow is looking to degrade it further as winter approaches. Ukraine has only a handful of surface-to-air missile batteries that can reliably intercept ballistic missiles. If Russia can concentrate more of its Iskanders on deep-strike missions, Ukraine’s limited air defense capacity will be stretched even further.  

The Fath-360 complements Russia’s existing shorter-range strike capabilities. These include the Tornado-S multiple launch rocket system, whose 9M544 and 9M549 300mm guided rockets have similar ranges as the Fath-360 but carry cluster munition warheads. Potential targets for the Fath-360 might include command posts, ammunition depots, equipment concentrations, and air defense systems.

Given the Fath-360’s unitary warhead and poor accuracy, however, reliably hitting anything other than large targets will be challenging. The Russians will have to fire bigger salvos to achieve the desired effects. This will cause Russia to burn through its stocks faster, and Iranian production may be unable to keep up.

Consequently, the Fath-360 might prove most useful for striking large critical infrastructure targets in cities close to the front line, such as Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Russia could also simply use the Iranian missiles to bombard cities indiscriminately. The Fath-360 would probably be better suited for this task than the anti-aircraft missiles that the Russians frequently lob at cities using the S-300/400 system’s secondary ground-attack capability.

Implications for the Iranian Threat

While Iran did wait to transfer the Fath-360 to Russia until after the UN prohibitions on its ballistic missile program lapsed in October 2023, the fact that the sale still took place highlights a deterrence deficit. Clearly, Tehran was not made to pay a sufficiently high price for its drone transfers to Russia over the last two years. Tehran now appears intent on building bridges with Moscow and turning their transactional relationship into a long-term strategic partnership.

Tehran is likely banking on Moscow being its lawyer at the UN Security Council for years to come, thwarting multilateral efforts to apply political and economic pressure on the clerical regime. This will be increasingly valuable to Tehran after October 2025, when the Western states will lose the ability to “snap back” international sanctions on Iran that were suspended by the 2015 nuclear deal. The importance of Russian diplomatic interference is magnified by its previous role in mediating negotiations to resurrect the nuclear deal.

From a military standpoint, the war in Ukraine will constitute a crucible unlike anything the Fath-360—or virtually any other Iranian missile—has yet seen. The system may perform poorly in combat, like the KN-23 short-range ballistic missiles that Russia received from North Korea. Nevertheless, this experience could help Tehran improve the Fath-360 and other Iranian ballistic missile systems, making for a more potent threat against U.S. forces, Israel, or other targets in the Middle East.

Another concern is the materiel or technological assistance Tehran may receive in return for the missile deal. Since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian-Iranian cooperation has ballooned. Tehran has supplied Moscow with thousands of Shahed one-way attack drones and other military aid, including by helping Russia establish a Shahed factory on its own territory. In return, Russia has offered the Islamic Republic “unprecedented defense cooperation,” as U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said last year. This includes a potential sale of Russian Su-35 fighter jets to Iran.

Further Russian support could increase the threat Iran poses to American interests in the Middle East. Indeed, U.S. and UK officials reportedly worry that Moscow has stepped up nuclear cooperation with Tehran in recent months, potentially putting the Iranians closer to building an atomic weapon. This would mark a dramatic reversal from Russia’s previous cooperation with the West on restraining Iran’s nuclear program.

Similarly, Russia could step up support for Iran’s space program. Moscow has already put multiple Iranian satellites into orbit using Russian rockets. Russia could help Tehran accelerate the development of its own space-launch vehicles (SLVs) as well. This technology could, in turn, help Iran develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of threatening the European continent and the American homeland.

Russo-Iranian Partnership: How High Will It Go?

Russia and Iran’s burgeoning partnership rests on their shared opposition to the West. Indeed, the war in Ukraine has brought Russian-Iranian defense cooperation to a height few would have predicted just a few years ago. It is clear that their confrontation with the West will not abate any time soon. What remains to be seen is just how far these two revisionist powers are willing to take their partnership in pursuit of their aims.