Russia’s July 8 attack on a children’s hospital in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, demonstrates more than just its brutality.
It also demonstrates how the Russian defense industry manages to circumvent Western sanctions targeting key electronic components.
This is how several experts assess.
Everything from American-made memory cards and electronic circuits to Dutch buffer chips have been found in the remains of cruise missiles like the Kh-101 that struck the Ukrainian children’s hospital.
This is reported by the official Ukrainian website war-sanctions.gur.gov.ua, which monitors whether the sanctions are working.
“Not all the electronic components in the Russian missiles are made for the military,” says Pavel Luzin, a researcher at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in the US.
“Many of them, perhaps even most of them, are made for consumers or industry and are still available to Russia on the global market”.
Russia’s July 8 attack on the Children’s Hospital in Kyiv was part of a larger wave of attacks that killed 40 people across Ukraine that day. A large part of the neighboring buildings to the hospital were also hit. The attack drew international condemnation.
An anonymous source claims to the AFP news agency that Russia, with the help of a number of friendly countries, has set up shell companies to circumvent the sanctions.
“The Chinese supply many of these products to the Russian military industry”, says the Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev, who lives in exile.
Against this background, the Russian defense industry has been able to maintain the production that Western countries previously thought would be forced to slow down at one point or another.
The newspaper The Financial Times recently wrote that Russia today manufactures eight times as many Kh-101 missiles as before the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“The actual figure could be much higher”, says Inozemtsev.
He estimates that Russia can produce between 700 and 750 Kh-101 this year and up to 1000 by 2025.
The anonymous source claims to AFP that the foreign components found in the remains of the Kh-101 cruise missiles originate primarily from the United States and Taiwan.
According to the anonymous source, Russia manages to acquire the components via foreign trade offices, embassies or shell companies, among other things. It has not been possible to confirm.
“It is virtually impossible to limit this flow of goods”, says Inozemtsev.
“The most effective thing would be to consider sanctions against Western manufacturers of semiconductors to make them scrutinize their customers better. But it would be too painful for Western companies’.
ritzau
Source: politiken.dk
