Russia deployed Iranian military personnel associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to the occupied territories to teach Russian forces how to use Shahed-136 attack drones. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) writes about this with reference to the Ukrainian Resistance Center.
According to the center, Iranian instructors have been sent to Dzhankoy in the Crimea, Zhelezny Port and Khladovtsy in the Kherson region. Their exact number is unknown.
The Resistance Center claims that Iranian instructors directly control the launches of drones on civilian targets in Ukraine, including in the Mykolaiv and Odessa regions.
The IRGC is Iran's main operator of unmanned aerial vehicles, so the Center assumes that the instructors are either employees of the corps or are associated with it.
On October 13, Ukraine announced the shelling of the Kyiv region with kamikaze drones. The head of the Kyiv military administration Oleksiy Kuleba said that the shelling began early in the morning. Zelensky's office reported attacks on infrastructure in the Kiev region:
“Regular strikes of kamikaze drones on critical infrastructure. The relevant services are already working to eliminate and document the consequences of shelling.”
Russia inflicted several more massive strikes on Nikolaev and other cities.