FBI investigates American components in Russian military equipment – WP

The U.S. is looking into the incident in which American electronics were used in Russian military gear.

This was reported by The Washington Post.

Agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation began questioning U.S. technology companies on how their computer chips ended up in Russian military equipment recovered in Ukraine.

According to sources, representatives of the US Department of Commerce, which enforces export control, conduct investigations together with the FBI. They visit companies to ask about Western chips and components found in Russian radar systems, drones, tanks, ground equipment, and ships.

The publication notes that the mere fact of a company’s chip being found into Russian armament does not mean that the company itself is under an investigation. The US launched “an investigation on how that company’s chip got into that system.”

One of the Commerce Department representatives commented on the investigation, saying “our goal is to actually try to track that back, all the way back to the U.S. supplier” to determine “how did it (chip – ed.) find its way into that weapons system.”

It isn’t clear which specific components are being probed. Investigators from other countries have discovered different Western electronics in Russian weapons used in combat in Ukraine.

Many of those components appear to have been manufactured prior to Russia seizing Crimea in 2014. But some were produced as recently as 2020, according to Conflict Armament Research (CAR).

CAR specialists were invited by the Security Service of Ukraine for an independent analysis of Russian equipment.

They found out that almost all of it contained chips, PCBs, motors, antennas, and other parts made by the US and the EU companies.

However, according to American and European officials, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February, the United States and dozens of other countries banned the export of advanced technologies to the Russian Federation.

Previously, we reported that foreign components were found in a Russian Sych-3 surveillance device captured in Ukraine. Captured modern Russian R-168-5UT-2 radios have also contained some American-made microchips.