A Russian Orlan-10 drone captured by Ukrainian troops contained a Xilinx brand semiconductor in the drone's targeting system. The image taken of the drone was clear enough to show the product line and other identifying markers such as its place of manufacture. Using trade data, CNS researchers gathered import data on all imports of Xilinx brand products to Russia from the time period of January 2017 to October 2021.
Front Companies
ARC Electronics and the Fishenko network is one of the best documented examples of dual-use export busting to the Russian Federation.
The Barysheff case involved a naturalized U.S. citizen in Brooklyn and two Russian nationals who were arrested in Denver as part of an alleged scheme to illegally ship microelectronics to the Russian Federation.
Alexander Brazhnikov Sr. was indicted after he allegedly moved an estimated $65 million in electronics from the United States to the Russian Federation from 2008 to 2014.[1] His customers allegedly included the Russian military, internal security services, and VNIIEF,[2] the latter of which is one of Russia’s most important nuclear weapons entities.
Ge Songtao was the chairman of Shanghai Breeze Technology Co. Ltd., a Shanghai-based company that specializes in marine equipment. For the advancement of his own company, Ge was looking to source “combat rubber raiding craft equipped with engines that could operate using gasoline, diesel fuel or jet fuel”. Ge leveraged an employee based in the United States named Yang Yang. Yang was instructed to order the gasoline engines that were military model.
Yi-Chi Shih, a California resident and former president of Chengdu GaStone Technology Company (CGTC), was attempting to steal monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMIC) from a US based company to ship back to China for reproduction by CGTC. Shih used a front company he operated called Pullman Lane Productions, LLC. Pullman was being financed by the PRC government for the acquisition of MMIC technology.