Poor man’s lend-lease: Russia continues to import U.S. microchips needed for missile navigation and Internet censorship despite sanctions

However, the schematics on the site do not include lot numbers or other identifiers that would allow the manufacturer to trace how these products entered Russia. The Insider contacted AMD with the information about the webpage displaying these product photos, but no reaction to these data had been received by the time of publication. According to customs data, chips labeled as shown in the pictures were indeed imported into Russia, but in no case is T-Component JV listed as the importer.

This indicates, among other things, the relative futility of attempts to challenge importing firms. It costs about $300 to set up or close an LLC in Russia — which is less than the cost of an hour's work of a lawyer in Washington, DC. Meanwhile, the actual shipments may be handled by entirely different companies.

Significant volumes of top-end Xilinx FPGAs (including those already built into printed circuit boards, or PCBs) were delivered to Russia by a company called ID Solution («Айди Солюшн»). It is associated with Merusoft («Мерусофт»), which specializes in facial recognition technologies. ID solution’s purchases suggest the company has substantial parallel computing capabilities — the products they order could even be used to build a supercomputer. On the other hand, judging from ID Solution's website, the company is busy retailing FPGAs to other consumers. Until recently, it was believed that ID Solution acted as a middleman for Russian companies purchasing components for drones. Drones typically use chips that cost hundreds, not tens of thousands, of dollars.

ID Solution, in particular, imported ready-made PCBs containing the latest FPGA matrices from Xilinx. The boards were manufactured by HiTech Global — a U.S. company.

In February 2023, ID Solution imported HTG-840 Virtex UltraScale PCBs containing the XCVU19P-1FSVB3824E FPGA, which costs more than $80,000, into Russia via Uzbekistan. This is the highest performance generation of programmable integrated logic circuits available on the market, the Virtex UltraScale+, which was released in 2023. There are 8,938,000 logic cells in this chip. By comparison, the XC2V1000TM circuit from the Kh-101 missile mentioned above has only 11,520 cells — about a thousand times fewer, and it costs around a thousand times less.

ID Solution and Macro Group were HiTech Global's official distributors in Russia. In 2014, Dmitry Veleslavov, chairman of the board of Macro Group, said in an interview with a specialized publication: “After the third wave of sanctions, we faced a ban on supplying all new families of Xilinx to Russia, which fall under 'dual-use,' including for civilian projects.” This clearly indicates that these companies could not have been unaware that they were violating sanctions laws.

Judging by the customs declarations, it seems that in some cases the cargo was not even repackaged in Uzbekistan’s capital Tashkent, but was immediately sent to Russia, as the declarations show the same weight of goods on the journey from the U.S. to Uzbekistan and from Uzbekistan to Russia.

The emergence of Uzbekistan and other post-Soviet countries as transit points is linked to the increasing complexity of traditional supply routes through China. Industry representatives told The Insider that the transit or re-export of dual-use (or embargoed) goods made in Europe or the U.S. — or the export from China of such goods produced using European or American technology — has recently come up against new obstacles. For example, when a Russian businessman tried to purchase an Arria 10 FPGA on Alibaba (with prices ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars per chip), the seller on AliExpress bluntly stated: “We can only do it on the black market.” Market experts are assuming these goods are now increasingly being transported using old-school smuggling methods — “inside TV sets or microwave ovens.”