Can it be that the same U.S. microchips powering Silicon Valley’s innovations are also directing Russian missiles onto Ukrainian cities? The evidence rolling in from the battlefield front lines leaves little doubt: hundreds of American-built chips, including field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and specialized integrated circuits, have been found among the debris of crashed Russian SU-34 and SU-35 warplanes, the mainstay of Moscow’s precision bombing effort against Ukraine. This harsh reality, painstakingly chronicled in a comprehensive inquiry by the Independent Anti-Corruption Commission and the International Partnership for Human Rights, has revealed not only the technological basis of Russia’s aerial campaign, but also the enduring weaknesses of global export control regimes.
Researchers examined over 180,000 customs records of shipments and wreckage of downed aircraft, and detected 1,119 microelectronic parts from 141 Western firms embedded inside Russian aircraft. Of those, 68% in SU-34s and 62% in SU-35s were U.S. sourced. The Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) designates two-thirds of these parts as high-priority, strictly prohibited for export to Russia because of their possible military uses. Among the most sensitive are Intel FPGAs and ICs from Analog Devices chips that act as the digital “nervous system” for avionics, navigation, targeting, and communications.
The technical function of FPGAs in these planes cannot be overstated. As field-programmable gate arrays, these chips provide a special combination of flexibility and processing power, enabling Russian engineers to reprogram avionics and weapon systems in real time, counter emerging threats, and sustain combat superiority. FPGAs are particularly adept at real-time signal processing, radar, and electronic warfare abilities key to the precision-guided munitions like the UMPB D30-SN glide bomb and Grom-1 missiles, which have laid waste to Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. Their reprogrammability, moreover, allows them, in Russian hands, to be upgraded to counter countermeasures or to incorporate new profiles of weapons without the necessity for new hardware an especially valuable asset in the fast-changing battlespace.
Albeit their sensitivity and severe export controls, these items still enter Russia’s military supply chain. The investigative report documents the blatant inefficiencies in U.S. and allied export compliance. As Senator Richard Blumenthal explained, We found companies’ efforts to track the path of their chips into Russia to be slow, unhelpful, or nonexistent our investigation shows that the excuses offered by companies to explain the presence of their products in Russia ring hollow. Texas Instruments, Intel, and Analog Devices are among the companies that have committed to improving compliance, but the Senate report highlights that monitoring of distributors and end-users is still unsatisfactory. “Safeguards have to be strengthened, and most importantly, they have to be enforced,” Blumenthal asserted.
The magnitude of the challenge is enhanced by the intricacy of international supply chains. After microelectronics are sold into the open market, it can be resold several times, frequently going through intermediary companies in jurisdictions with weak enforcement. In just 2023, Russia imported some $805 million in priority microelectronics through countries like China, Hong Kong, Turkey, and the UAE, where shell companies and transshipment points cover the ultimate destination and military end-use. As described in one industry report, “third-country transshipment hubs and clandestine networks operated by Russia’s special services are now working to build new routes to secure access to Western microelectronics.”
China’s involvement in this technology leak is direct and structural. As Chris Miller, author of “Chip War,” puts it, Ten percent of this problem is about Western chip firms’ compliance efforts, which I think are insufficient. But 90% is about Beijing’s active support of Russia’s war effort. But 90% concerns Beijing’s overt assistance to Russia’s war effort. Customs statistics indicate that China and Hong Kong collectively supplied almost 90 percent of all chips exported from around the world to Russia from March through December 2022. Hong Kong, which was once celebrated for its enforcement of exports, has, under Beijing’s guidance, become a sanction-permissive node. Hong Kong and Chinese-registered shell companies enable the diversion of U.S.-produced chips, occasionally openly touting their capability to source sanctioned components for Russian defense companies.
Russia’s procurement networks are equally matched by their brazenness in terms of technical sophistication. Certain Russian suppliers openly advertise “parallel imports” of sanctioned products, and customs records indicate that even state-owned defense holding companies such as Rostec’s Ural Optical-Mechanical Plant received deliveries of U.S. microelectronics through Chinese subsidiaries. As the inquiry reports, the existence of these components within Russian weaponry is not a legacy problem numerous parts were produced and exported well past the start of sanctions, some bombs discovered in Ukraine having manufacturing dates only weeks prior to use.
The continued viability of U.S. technology within Russia’s military machine has prompted demands for both more stringent sanctions and a wholesale restructuring of supply chain compliance. Governments must implement harsher sanctions against Russia, and manufacturers must introduce higher due diligence and supply chain control standards to prevent their products’ diversion into Russia’s weapons, IPHR’s Anastasiya Donets wrote. However, as the conflict prolongs, the technical and geopolitical imperatives of international semiconductor trade continue to erode the very sanctions intended to choke Moscow’s arsenal.
