Russia Is Buying American Microchips for Weapons — Despite Sanctions

An investigation by The Kyiv Independent reveals an unregulated supply chain.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin inspects an unmanned drone used for military purposes. (Photo by Contributor/Getty Images)

Everything from Russian missiles to drones to howitzers requires microchips to propel them in their attacks on Ukrainian cities. Specifically, American and European microchips.

Leaked emails obtained by The Kyiv Independent sent from a Russian state holding company called Ruselectronics to the Russian defense industry prove as much. And a two-pronged investigation by the newspaper lays out the complex pipeline that is allowing the production of weapons used against Ukraine to continue, despite sanctions put in place on Feb. 24, 2022, the day of the Russian invasion.

Reporter Alisa Yurchenko dug into the emails and posed as a Russian defense manufacturer trying to purchase American-made microchips. She sent her request to two-dozen Russian suppliers. Ten replied, saying they could provide the chips. “Surprisingly,” Yurchenko wrote, “the most difficult aspect of the experiment was to create an email account with a Russian email service, as they are blocked in Ukraine. When that was done, trying to buy banned Western chips in Russia was easy.”

One of the Russian companies she emailed, Elesar Grupp (which is under U.S. sanctions), said they had millions of microchips made by major American and European brands in stock, including from U.S. manufacturers Analog Devices, Texas Instruments, Microchip Technology, Xilinx (AMD), ON Semiconductor and Intel.

So how is this happening? How are the Russians able to flout sanctions so easily?

Even before the war, Russia didn’t import American and European microchips directly from the manufacturers. They went through a network of private and public Russian companies, according to Yurchenko. And that network obtains its chips via China and Hong Kong. Some of the chips are even made in American factories in countries like China, Malaysia or the Philippines. This, however, “does not reduce their liabilities to follow sanctions,” Erlend B. Bjortvedt, founder of Corisk, an Oslo-based consulting company that studies sanctions, told the Independent.

That liability is expansive.

“When a product that is prohibited for sale to Russia, according to U.S. rules, goes from China to Russia, this is not a violation from China’s perspective,” said Vladyslav Vlasiuk, Ukraine’s presidential commissioner for sanctions policy. “However, it would be a violation of sanctions from the U.S. point of view.”

This is why, Vlasiuk explains, Chinese suppliers of microchips to Russia are on U.S. sanctions lists. Still, half of the Chinese microchip manufacturers who supply Ruseletronics that the Independent was able to verify, and their buyers, are not under U.S. sanctions.

Then there is the issue of corporate responsibility. Companies often say they are doing all they can to control a complex and tricky global supply chain, but are they really?

“Western chips manufacturers have had tremendous growth and profits over the last decades, but they have not invested in compliance and internal investigation,” Bjortvedt said.

And now not only is the U.S. not supplying Ukraine with weapons any longer, it is turning away from its responsibility to curb continued Russian war crimes against a civilian population by not working to actively broaden sanctions on the companies that makes Russian weapons production possible.

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