The ceasefire between the United States and Iran is barely holding. Pakistani mediators are still shuttling between capitals, fighting has flared in recent days, and President Trump is now sitting across from Xi Jinping in Beijing for a high-stakes summit covering trade, Iran, and Taiwan.
Yet American intelligence has reached a different conclusion about what Beijing is actually doing: China is preparing to move man-portable air-defense systems, MANPADs, to Iran through third-country cutouts, according to CNN, which cited three sources familiar with recent intelligence assessments. The shipments would reach Tehran while Beijing holds itself out as the party that helped stop the war.
The CCP, however, is deliberately doing both things at once.
The intelligence indicates Iran may be using the ceasefire as an opportunity to replenish weapons systems with the help of key foreign partners, with indications that Beijing is working to route the shipments through third countries to mask their true origin. The MANPADs in question are shoulder-fired, infrared-guided missiles — systems that require little infrastructure, minimal operator training, and can be concealed inside civilian vehicles, urban terrain, or dispersed military positions.
On April 3, an American F-15E Strike Eagle was shot down over Iran by a shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile — a fact Trump later confirmed publicly, saying the Iranians “got lucky.” Whether that system was Chinese-manufactured remains unconfirmed; Iran also produces its own Misagh MANPAD series, reverse-engineered copies of Chinese QW-series designs, meaning the Chinese origin of any given shoulder-fired missile over Iranian airspace may never be definitively established.
What is confirmed is that Tehran noticed what worked, and Beijing appears to be resupplying accordingly.
“The sending of MANPADs to Iran would represent an escalation in Chinese assistance, moving beyond traditionally supplying spare parts to Iran’s missile and drone program to the transfer of actual complete weapons systems,” Jason Brodsky, policy director at United Against Nuclear Iran, tells The Cipher Brief.
Neither Russia nor China fired a shot against American forces. They didn’t need to. For years, Moscow and Beijing have quietly supplied Tehran with the intelligence, technology, and weapons components needed to keep Iran capable of threatening United States forces — before wars start. At the same time, they’re being fought, and during the ceasefires in between. The pause in fighting did not stop that effort. It created cover for the next round.
Russia’s contribution: orbits and operational intelligence
Beyond diplomacy, Russia provided Iran with intelligence to aid strikes against United States forces in the region. According to reporting by the Washington Post, Moscow shared the locations of United States warships, aircraft, and radar systems with Tehran during the opening days of the conflict — what one official described as a “pretty comprehensive effort.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that the assistance went beyond location data: Russia was also feeding Iran satellite imagery from its Aerospace Forces, giving Tehran a clearer picture of what its strikes had hit and what to aim at next.
The results were visible in the strike patterns themselves. Meanwhile, satellite imagery found that at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment were hit at United States military sites across the Middle East, with radar installations, communications facilities, and air defense equipment among the most heavily targeted — a level of precision that exceeded Iranian strike patterns in the 12-day war between Iran and Israel in June 2025.
That precision has a signature. Iran had spent years supplying Russia with Shahed drones for use against Ukraine; Moscow was now returning the knowledge investment with interest. Russia shared battlefield lessons from its drone war in Ukraine with Iran, including guidance on strike altitudes and how many drones to deploy in a single wave — drone swarms used to overwhelm radar, followed by precision missile strikes against command-and-control nodes. Moreover, Iranian strike patterns in the Gulf increasingly resembled Russian tactics honed in Ukraine.
Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, tells The Cipher Brief that Russian and Chinese assistance is a direct reason for Iran’s improved targeting between June 2025 and the most recent conflict.
“However, the United States provided similar intelligence to Ukraine, so it is hard for the Trump administration to push back,” she explains.
The groundwork Russia laid before the first shot was fired made the intelligence-sharing during the war far more lethal. Russia built and launched the Khayyam satellite in August 2022, a Kanopus-V Earth-observation platform with a resolution of 1.2 meters, giving Tehran the ability to conduct near-continuous surveillance of specific United States and Israeli military facilities.
S-400 air defense components began arriving in Iran from Russia in 2024, with at least one battery deployed near Isfahan. Years earlier, Moscow had also delivered the Rezonans-NE, an over-the-horizon radar that can track stealth aircraft and ballistic missiles out beyond 400 miles.
What greeted United States and Israeli aircraft over Iran in February 2026 was not purely Iranian. The detection infrastructure had Russian fingerprints on it — years of deliberate investment in Tehran’s ability to see and track what was coming.
China’s fingerprints: navigation, components, and the dual-use pipeline
What China offered Iran wasn’t firepower. It was independence. Folding Tehran into BeiDou — Beijing’s military-grade satellite navigation system — meant Iran’s drones and missiles no longer depended on GPS signals that the United States and Israel had already demonstrated they could disrupt. During the June 2025 twelve-day war, Israeli jamming knocked out Iranian GPS-guided weapons almost immediately.
By the fourth day, Iran had shifted its drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic weapons onto BeiDou-3, and the jamming stopped working. The system’s encrypted military signals, defense analysts say, are essentially unjammable.
The dual-use component pipeline ran deeper still. In February 2025, the United States Treasury Department sanctioned Chinese front companies supplying gyro navigation devices to enhance Iranian-made UAVs. In November 2025, a separate network connected to Iran’s Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company was accused of using shell firms to acquire Chinese sensors and navigation equipment. Since China gave Iran access to BeiDou in 2021, Tehran has also used the system to produce decoy signals to confuse threat analysis and conceal actual Iranian military movements.
There is a pattern worth noting in how Chinese dual-use exports to Iran have moved. They rose after Trump signed a maximum pressure memorandum on Iran in early 2025. They rose again after the United States strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025. Beijing has not acted despite American escalation. It has acted because of it.
Multiple sanctioned Iranian ships believed to be carrying sodium perchlorate, a precursor material for solid-propellant rockets, have traveled from China to Iran since the war began. Shanghai-based MizarVision — which holds a Chinese National Military Standard certificate and, like all Chinese companies, operates under Beijing’s national security law — systematically published AI-enhanced satellite imagery of United States military movements throughout the conflict, including carrier strike groups and F-22 positions at regional bases.
There is a pattern worth noting in how Chinese dual-use exports to Iran have moved. They rose after Trump signed a maximum pressure memorandum on Iran in early 2025. They rose again after the United States strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025. Beijing has not acted despite American escalation. It has acted because of it.
Iranian strikes later hit a number of the sites MizarVision flagged. Jing’an Technology was doing much the same. For Beijing, the arrangement was convenient — private firms, at least on paper, doing work the Chinese government could disavow.
Washington also accused SMIC, China’s largest chipmaker, of supplying chipmaking tools and technical training to Iran’s military industrial complex, beginning roughly a year before the war. Beijing denied each allegation in sequence.
The reconstitution problem
The deeper strategic problem is not what Russia and China did during the war. It is what they are positioning to do after it.
After suffering major battlefield losses during the October 2024 Israeli campaign and the June 2025 twelve-day war, Iran was able to rapidly reconstitute key elements of its missile and military infrastructure with external support — restoring its ability to threaten the United States and its regional allies in a matter of months. The pattern repeated itself after February 2026. The ceasefire may have halted the kinetics, but it did not halt the resupply.
MANPADs fit the reconstitution requirement precisely — lightweight, dispersible, and effective against the low-flying aircraft that United States and Israeli forces would rely on in any renewed campaign.
Not everyone thinks sanctions were ever the right tool here.
“This is not new,” Kavanagh notes. “China provided Iran with new weapons and air defense systems after the 12-day war and has assisted Iran’s military in other ways for years.”
Sanctions, meanwhile, are losing their bite. “Sanctions and export controls slow reconstruction as they temporarily disrupt procurement networks,” Brodsky says, “but the challenge is the Iranian regime has been adept at establishing new workarounds and evasion mechanisms — sometimes faster than the United States government can dismantle them.”
“U.S. sanctions have begun to lose their effect,” Kavanagh says. “China and Russia have proven adept at avoiding them and are willing to ignore them. Sanctions won’t prevent Iran from rearming.”
Defense analyst John Wood tells The Cipher Brief that the physical resupply is already moving. During the ceasefire, he says, Russia has been pushing assets across the Caspian Sea while China has been using overland rail routes to do the same — a coordinated, parallel effort to rebuild Iranian capacity before any renewed hostilities. “The objective is obvious,” he says. “Bleed the United States and Europe economically and militarily.”
Asked about the MANPAD intelligence on April 12 as he left the White House, Trump issued a terse warning: “If China does that, China will have big problems.” Whether that threat lands before the shipment does remains the operative question — particularly given that the joint statement from the Beijing summit includes agreement that Iran must never obtain a nuclear weapon and that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open, but contains no explicit commitment from Xi on weapons transfers to Tehran.
Beijing’s leverage over Washington is not limited to the battlefield. The late October 2025 exchange in South Korea, Washington's suspension of the Bureau of Industry and Security Affiliates Rule, and Beijing's pause on rare-earth export controls were a pointed illustration of how much the United States’ defense industrial base depends on materials that China controls and can restrict at will.
It holds cards over Tehran’s survival. And it is playing both — publicly mediating while quietly rearming, letting Russia absorb the harder accusations while preserving its own deniability.
Both Moscow and Beijing share a structural interest in the outcome, even if their calculus differs.
“Beijing and Moscow are happy to watch the United States waste its military power in the Middle East,” Kavanagh says, “but both also suffer costs from the war. For Beijing, higher energy prices and the precedent created by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are worrisome even if they are glad to see Washington entangled in the Middle East.”
Both, she argues, would like to see the war end, but on terms favorable to Iran. Brodsky puts the longer-term stakes more plainly.
“If the United States meaningfully erodes the Iranian regime’s capability to project power beyond its borders, that actually harms Russia and China in the long run — as they now have a weakened partner.”
Neither Moscow nor Beijing wants an Iranian collapse that would invite American consolidation across the region. What they want is a Tehran that survives, reconstitutes, and keeps Washington consumed. The ceasefire is not the end of the strategy. For both powers, it is the condition under which the next phase begins.
“The longer the war goes on, the more it works to China’s advantage,” Wood says. “And raises the likelihood of a Taiwan blockade.”
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