Russia Is Attacking Ukraine Using U.S. Electronics

JUST IN – How Russia Uses U.S. Electronics To Attack Ukraine

Russian rocket launcher

Vitaly V. Kushmin photo via Wiki Commons

WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. sanctions and export controls are intended to prevent rivals from obtaining semiconductors and other sensitive electronics, yet dozens of weapon systems Russia has deployed against Ukraine are loaded with — and can’t function without — U.S. and Western electronics, according to a U.K. think tank.

Radars, electronic warfare technology, missiles and guidance systems — even secure communications devices — are among the 27 different systems Russia has used in Ukraine found to contain western electronics, Jack Watling, a fellow with the Royal United Services Institute, or RUSI, said during a Jan. 26 presentation at the Wilson Center think tank in Washington, D.C.

Watling was present in Ukraine during the initial days of the war. He met with a general from Ukraine who gave him a salvaged computer case from a Russian 9M727 ballistic missile. “And as he went through the layers of chipboards, he started pointing out all of the chips that were manufactured in the United States, which was a very significant proportion of them,” He said.

This was the beginning of the cataloging process for foreign components The think tank is found in Russian systems.

One was the radar that would be used to detect a Russian air defence system, he stated. “As a military analyst, I had spent weeks trying to work out how to defeat these systems, only to realize that actually the critical components in them were not just Western made, but in many cases, export control components — components that we have been trying to prevent getting into Russia.”

He noted that although many of the systems they analysed were older systems, some electronic components were newer than 2021.

Over the years, Russia has developed a robust — if sometimes deceptively simple — system of evading sanctions and illegally obtaining technology, panelists said.

“A lot of our sanctions processes have been around attacking companies,” Watling stated. “But the infrastructure is fundamentally built around people, not companies. It’s been built for a very long time. It’s been operating for a very long time. And we’re doing far less to degrade that infrastructure.”

Panelists said that Russian agents could make purchases in the United States and then ship the components to themselves at an address in the United States. Then, they would repackage the components and send them to Russia via intermediaries or shell companies.

They discovered that Russia’s current method of circumventing export controls is a direct copy of the Soviet playbook from the Cold War.

“We’ve actually identified a number of commonalities of these procurement networks, most notably the use of transshipment hubs to try to circumvent some of these export controls and sanctions were already in place prior to invasion, and now much more stringent following that,” Gary Somerville (research fellow at RUSI), said the following:

Russia can create modern weapons by using western electronics, but it comes with a cost, according to James Byrne (director of open-source intelligence analysis at RUSI). “It also introduces a critical vulnerability into their systems, which is: we have control over some of the ultimate technology in their supply chains.”

Therefore, if the west can interdict the illicit supply chains, that can greatly diminish Russia’s capability and its efforts to rearm as it blows through its weapons stocks, he said. He said that removing one type of chip could delay the production of a weapon, or missile by several months.

That is no small task, given that RUSI’s research turned up 450 microelectronics components in the Russian systems, and 81 of the components had export control numbers. The Russian weapons also contained Japanese capacitors, British oscillators, and Dutch pressure sensors. Additionally, Iranian weapons as well as most likely North Korean or Chinese weapons are full of Western electronics.

“We think there have been definite successes in slowing these exports down,” Byrne said. “There have been a range of people that have been indicted. There are a range of people that have been sanctioned, [and] have been pursued by the authorities.”

He noted that agencies in the West are not well-resourced and still use legacy tracking systems.

Somerville said that “export control is very reactive at the moment, and what we are [facing] here is an adversary who is proactively working their way around the gaps.”

Some of the mechanisms that were created during the war against terror to share information between agencies and countries might make a difference. “that doesn’t really exist within the export control space,” He concluded.

Panelists stated that there is a lot of open-source data RUSI and other organizations can use to track down the problem. They can purchase data sets that include shipping transactions, customs records, and corporate records. Artificial intelligence can then be used to identify evidence of criminal activity.

“So, because there’s so much data out there it’s just a question of fusing it and doing the analysis and turning the product out in a speedy timely way,” Byrne said.

Watling stated that the ideal solution is for covert intelligence agents to coordinate with open source centers to alert them to areas they should be monitoring so they can flag anomalies immediately.

“You don’t need to reveal that there was some classified collection that that cued you on, but it means that in the ocean of open-source information, you can really rapidly build datasets that you can share,” He said. This is how it works: When someone tries to purchase something, “the indicators and warnings come on, and the person can be blown before they succeed.”

Topics: Defense Department, Global Defense Market, International