The manufacturer of the Orlan-10 drones, which the Russian Federation uses in Ukraine, purchases components in the USA and China bypassing sanctions

The main thing from the investigation of "important stories", Reuters and Rusi

The manufacturer of the “Orlan-10” drones, which the Russian army uses in Ukraine, purchases foreign components through intermediary firms in the USA, China and Russia. About how the network is arranged, which helps to receive details bypassing sanctions, it is described in the investigation of “important stories” , Reuters and the British Institute of Defense Research (RUSI).

Russia has been using "eagles" in Ukraine since 2014. According to journalists, the drone is mainly collected from foreign components. Rusi found that we are talking about products from American Altera and Xilinx, Texas Instruments, Microchip Technology, Linear Technology, European Stmicroelectors and NXP SemiconDumbors, Japanese, Japanese Renesas Electronics and Saito Seisakusho.

The production of "Orlanov" has been engaged in the St. Petersburg company "Special Technological Center" (STC), which since 2016 has been under US sanctions for "assistance to GRU in conducting electronic intelligence." In 2017, the US authorities called the STC part of the reconnaissance complex of the Russian Federation and banned any “significant” transactions with the company.

According to the investigation, the main supplier of foreign components for the STC is the SMT-Ailogic company. Since the beginning of the war, the company, among other things, purchased products from the same foreign companies whose components were discovered in the "eagles", the investigation said. In total, from January to October 2022, the IMT-Aiologik import reached $ 25.7 million (more than 1.65 billion rubles at the current rate).

The leadership of the STC said that it did not hear about the SMT-Ailogic. At the same time, one of the owners of the manufacturer Dronov Alexei Terentyev, according to the register, was a co-founder of SMT-Ailogic, noted "important stories".

SMT-Ailogic, in turn, receives the main volume of foreign components from the Hong Kong Asia Pacific Links. This company is owned by Russian Alexander Trofimov, who lives in Toronto. As the journalists found out, since 2017, ASIA Pacific Links has set the SMT-Ailogic components of $ 12 million. About half of this amount was for the period since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The American intermediary is the company IK Tech, owned by a citizen of the Russian Federation and the USA, Igor Deman, who is also known as Alex Stanton. So, from 2018 to 2021, IK Tech delivered $ 2.2 million to Russia. More than 90% of them were orders of SMT-Ailogic. Among these goods there were almost 1400 processor production modules Gumstix. The same components were found in Russian "eagles" in Ukraine.

Two weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, everyone was arrested on charges of smuggling of military and dual -purpose products to Russia, “important stories” write. At the trial, he said that in 2016 he met at a conference on satellites with Russian managers who persuaded it to supply products bypassing export restrictions.

In a conversation with the authors of the investigation, Deman admitted that he supplied electronic components to Russia: “I don’t think this is such a big problem. I don’t think you need to write about it. ”

Manufacturers of foreign components who responded to the requests of investigators said that they strictly comply with sanctions and did not know about the supply of their products to Russia. The American company Gumstix also promised to conduct an investigation.

For violation of export control rules, criminal liability is provided, the authors of the investigation noted. However, it is unlikely that something threatens manufacturers if supplies go through an intermediary in a third country, and components do not fall under export control. “They will hardly be pursued for such a manufacturer. If only the seller did not lie in export declarations. But usually nothing is done in such cases, ”Eric Woods from the Center for Research in the field of non -proliferation told reporters.