About 60% of the foreign parts found in Russian weapons on battlefields in Ukraine came from China, Vladyslav Vlasyuk, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, told reporters on Tuesday, the 24th of September, reports Reuters.
Despite extensive Western sanctions imposed since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Moscow has been able to replenish its military supplies with Western chips and semiconductors.
“If you look at all the usual types of weapons and count the parts made abroad, about 60% of them come from China. We have had long discussions with some manufacturers about this,” said Vlasyuk, who was in Brussels to meet with European Union (EU) and G7 member states to discuss sanctions against Russia. “I would say the biggest problem is China.”
He pointed out that China not only supplies Russia directly, but also serves as a transit route for Western products,
with key parts for surveillance, drones and missiles, found in Ukraine, coming from the US, the Netherlands, Japan, Ireland and Switzerland, as well as other Western countries.
Vlasyuk reported that advanced chips from US companies, including Analog Devices, Texas Instruments, AMD-owned Xilinx and Intel Altera, have been found in Russian weapons.
According to documents Vlasyuk showed to journalists, which list hundreds of samples he said were found on the battlefield, some parts were manufactured more than a decade ago and others in the past year, with Vlasyuk noting that it is often unclear whether these chips were intended for missiles or other products.
Meanwhile, the Kyiv Post reports that the pro-Russian Telegram channel “Ugolok Sitha” published photos of Russian soldiers in Ukraine posing with a Chinese ZFB-05 Xinxing “Tiger” 4×4 armoured personnel carrier (APC) modified and prepared for battlefield use, with anti-drone protection on the bonnet, windscreen, sides and top, a machine gun turret and camouflage net.
This vehicle also raises questions about how it came to be in Russia, with China claiming that it has not supplied military equipment to Russia, and there is a possibility that it was purchased through third parties without Beijing’s consent or knowledge, as it is widely used by security forces in South America, Central Asia and Africa.
