Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday that his government has followed the United States and European Union (EU) in designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization.
Zelensky said in his nightly address on Monday that he was bringing Ukraine into alignment with the EU, which labeled the IRGC a terrorist organization last Thursday. The U.S. listed the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization in 2019.
“European procedures are currently underway. We in Ukraine have already made this decision and have already designated this organization as terrorist, and for us this issue is closed,” he said.
“The whole world sees what is happening in Iran, how many people have been killed, and how the Iranian regime has contributed to the spread of war and violence in the region and the world,” he said.
“Ukraine has not forgotten any of the thousands of Shaheds that attack our cities and villages, our people,” he added.
“All terrorists in the world deserve the same treatment and condemnation. No one should win,” he concluded.
Shaheds are a series of Iranian-made kamikaze drones that were adopted by Russia as weapons against Ukraine. Russia initially denied buying Ukrainian drones, instead claiming it was producing its own drone weapons that coincidentally looked exactly like the Iranian products.
After NATO countries began shooting errant Shaheds down over their territory, Moscow stopped denying that it was using hundreds of Iranian drones in its attacks on Ukraine, combined with its own domestically-produced copies known as the Geran.
The Shahed design was so appealing to Russia because it is very inexpensive – they can be produced for as little as $20,000 apiece, using plywood airframes, and Iran has a massive stockpile of them for sale in the early days of the invasion, when Ukraine demonstrated a significant drone advantage over Russia.
The Ukrainian military claims Russia has launched over 8,000 Shahed drones during the invasion so far, and is now producing hundreds of them per day in its own factories.
Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, said on its website that the IRGC was added to its list of designated terrorist organizations on January 30.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar applauded Zelensky’s announcement on Monday, calling it an “important diplomatic and moral decision – against terror, against repression, for freedom.”
The Iranian regime, on the other hand, was enraged by the EU’s decision to join the United States in naming the IRGC as terrorists. Iranian lawmakers donned IRGC uniforms, hoisted an IRGC flag, claimed the IRGC is “the largest anti-terrorism organization in the world,’ and chanted “Death to America! Death to Israel!” in a parliamentary session on Sunday.
During this session, lawmakers said Iran would now consider the armed forces of every state in the European Union to be “terrorists.”
Also on Sunday, the Iranian regime summoned the ambassadors from EU member states to lodge a “strong protest” against the “unjustified and irresponsible” decision to label the IRGC as a terrorist organization.
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