22 - The Flider Affair

Pavel Flider is a Russian émigré and naturalized American citizen who allegedly used his California company Trident International to transship advanced electronics to the Russian Federation. According to court documents, Flider did this using a series of fronts located in Estonia and Finland. The scheme was caught when U.S. customs officials intercepted an outgoing shipment at the San Francisco[1] airport containing 15 Field Programmable Gate Arrays from the American (FPGA) company Xilinx. Xilinx’s Field Programmable Gate Arrays are the Spartan series.[2] The Xilinx Spartan series of products includes a programmable semiconductor that has repeatedly been found inside Russian military drones in Ukraine for years.[3] Flider’s network appears to have sent at least hundreds of the devices to Russia based on seizure data published by American investigators. [4]

Flider sent the packages out of the country with false labeling. The high-end semiconductors used in Russian military drones seized by U.S. customs for example were labeled as “power supplies”.[5] The equipment first went to an Estonian freight forwarder of whom Trident was their only client.[6] The shipments then went through Finland, before being handed to a Saint Petersburg company for distribution amongst Russia’s defense industrial base. Money was sent back via a series of bank accounts to mask the source of the funds.[7]