18JUL

Russians named in IRGC arms network

2 min read

13:17UTC

OFAC designated a seven-node IRGC weapons network on 15 July and, for the first time in this war, named two Russian nationals directly.

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ConflictAssessed

Key takeaway

Treasury sanctioned an IRGC arms network and named two Russians, putting evidence behind claims of Russian support.

OFAC (the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control) designated a seven-node IRGC weapons-procurement network on 15 July under Executive Order 13382, citing Iran's attacks on commercial vessels in the strait of Hormuz.⁠¹

For the first time in this war's Iran arms track, the designation names Russian nationals directly. Mariya Selina, head of finance at the Moscow aviation-transport firm Avratek OOO, was described by Treasury as a longtime procurement agent for Iran; her colleague Vadim Druzhbin was named for coordinating Iranian shipments.⁠² Executive Order 13382 is the authority Washington reserves for weapons-of-mass-destruction proliferators and the financiers who fund them.

The action extends the sanctions track that named the Supreme Leader's Dubai financier Ali Ansari a week earlier, moving Treasury's aim from Iran's own money to the foreign supply chain behind its drones.

Naming Avratek's finance chief rather than a shell company signals that Treasury holds transaction-level intelligence on the money flow, not merely the logistics. Dmitry Medvedev's funeral-week praise for Iran's Hormuz leverage had been rhetoric; a designation tying a Moscow firm's finance head to IRGC drone procurement is a documented supply line, and it gives Washington grounds to reach further into Russian aviation firms under the same authority.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

OFAC is the part of the US Treasury that punishes people and companies by freezing their US-linked money and banning American firms from doing business with them. On 15 July it sanctioned a seven-part network accused of helping Iran's IRGC (the Iranian force running much of the war effort) buy weapons parts. For the first time in this network, it named two actual Russian people, Mariya Selina and Vadim Druzhbin, who work at a Moscow aviation company called Avratek.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

OFAC designations depend on a documented paper trail linking named individuals to a traceable corporate entity.

Avratek OOO's registration as a Moscow aviation-transport firm gave investigators that trail, something the earlier all-Chinese shell-company designations in this arms track lacked, which is why Selina and Druzhbin could be named by name while other nodes in the network remain anonymous.

What could happen next?

Precedent
Naming individual Russian nationals sets a template Treasury can reuse against other Avratek employees or Russian firms it has so far left unnamed in this arms track.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: OFAC's 2018 designation of Russian nationals tied to the Wagner Group's Sudan and Central African Republic gold networks similarly named individuals working through a documented commercial entity, rather than sanctioning the Russian state directly, to reach a foreign-proxy network.

Counter-parallel: Sanctions against Rosoboronexport, Russia's state arms-export monopoly, hit an entire state entity rather than named employees at one firm, and produced measurable disruption to arms sales in a way a two-person designation at Avratek is unlikely to match.

Consensus view: The Atlantic Council's Brian O'Toole reads the direct naming of Mariya Selina and Vadim Druzhbin as Treasury widening the Iran arms track beyond the Chinese shell companies it burned in June, now reaching into Russia's defence-industrial supply chain by name for the first time.

Counter-view: Commentary from Moscow's Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) argues the designation targets two mid-level Avratek employees, not the Russian state or a state-owned defence firm, functioning as a symbolic marker rather than a measure that disrupts Moscow-Tehran military cooperation.

Key tension: Whether naming individual Russian nationals marks a genuine widening of Treasury's willingness to sanction Russia-Iran arms cooperation, or a low-cost symbolic gesture that avoids touching state-level actors.

Sources:US Treasury OFAC·US Treasury OFAC

Mentions:OFAC →US Treasury →Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) →Avratek OOO →Executive Order 13382 →Ali Ansari →Dmitry Medvedev →Strait of Hormuz →The Atlantic →Moscow →Russia →Iran →Washington →Atlantic Council →Tehran →Dubai →Supreme Leader →

First Reported In

Update #155 · US bombing moves inland as blockade hardens

US Treasury OFAC· 18 Jul 2026

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Different Perspectives

Russia

Russia vetoed the same renewal on 17 September, arguing that Britain, France and Germany never validly triggered the snapback that reimposed the pre-2015 UN resolutions. No panel was ever seated under that mandate, so the UN list decays fastest for states that screen against it rather than against the American one.

China

China vetoed renewal of the UN sanctions monitoring mandate on 17 September, arguing that Resolution 2231 terminated on 18 October 2025 and that the Security Council should drop Iran's nuclear file altogether. On that reading there is nothing to monitor, so the sanctions survive and their enforcement does not.

Iraq

Baghdad saw the last American counter-Islamic State troops leave its territory on 30 September, completing a timetable it agreed with Washington in September 2024. Iraqi airspace deconfliction passes to Baghdad, which still has an open inquiry into the Maysan drone launches that has named nobody.

Pakistan

Treasury names Waseem Pasha Tajammal of Rawalpindi as the Cavalier group's chairman and places one of the designated incorporations in Islamabad. QatarEnergy separately told Pakistan that liquefied natural gas cargo cancellations would run through November, so Islamabad carries an enforcement question and a supply gap at once.

Turkey

Treasury named a Cavalier Dynamics company incorporated in Istanbul among the ten nodes it designated on 29 September, and Ankara has published no response. Turkey imported a record 120,000 barrels a day of Indian diesel in August, cutting Russia's share of its diesel imports to 20 per cent.

India

Suraj Yadav, a wiper from Uttar Pradesh, was killed aboard the Cape Dao on 23 September, and 19 of the ship's 20 Indian crew were taken off alive. India's September imports ran at 575,000 barrels a day from Iraq and 566,000 from Saudi Arabia, back to pre-conflict rates.

Written with AI from Lowdown's published reporting. Not individually reviewed by an editor. Editorial standards.