Machinery from New York-based company used to build Russian weapons used in war on Ukraine, 3 October 2023

...With support from the Pulitzer Center, "NewsHour" traveled to Ukraine and Upstate New York to investigate an industrial technology that has the U.S.

Department of Defense among its clients. Its products appear to be prized in Russia as well, where the military industrial complex has ramped up to meet the demand of the war in Ukraine...
This is the Uraltrac Chelyabinsk tractor plant in Russia. It's seen orders soar for the battle tank engines it manufactures since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year...

Uraltrac uses the Niles-Simmons to create crankshafts needed for its various diesel tank engines. The company that makes the machine tool is called NSH and has its roots in the Upstate New York Simmons Machine Tool Corporation, which manufactures train wheel maintenance equipment used by many U.S. metro transit systems.

NSH USA Corp., as the company is now known, also supplies the U.S. Department of Defense and was awarded an $8.8 million defense contract from the U.S. army for the supply of CNC boring and milling machines last year.

Although the Niles-Simmons machine tools NSH's defense clients are interested in get made in Germany, it's 100 percent American-owned company, so it's subject to us export controls. They have got manufacturing facilities in Germany and in China, but also in Sterling Heights, Michigan, and here in Albany.
So how did a machine tool made by a company that got its start in the New York state capital end up on the floor of a factory owned by Russia's only tank manufacturer, Uralvagonzavod, which has been subject to U.S. sanctions since 2014?

The answer lies with this man, the German-born American chairman of NSH Group, Hans Naumann, who's been very vocal about his opposition to sanctions against Russia. Here's Naumann in 2016...the sanctions were foisted on us by the United States. We will get rid of them only when America gives the safe zone. I hope that the decision will be made soon...

Customs records obtained by "NewsHour" reveal that shipments to the Russian arms industry continued. In 2016, NSH shipped an N50 mill and turn center worth over $3 million from its factory in Germany to the Kolomensky zavod in the Moscow region, which manufactures massive diesel engines for the Russian railways industry, but also, notably, for the country's navy...

David Davis, President, NSH USA:

Our policy is obviously to follow U.S. export compliance, so that's why it's important to us to know what you're talking about, not for the purpose of trying to prove right or wrong, but just trying to prove which machines we're talking about...

Once I'd given Davis the details of the three sales we uncovered, he e-mailed me that NSH had had German export licenses approved, but the names on them didn't match the end users, meaning NSH's client may have misled the company about who the machines were actually for, or NSH knew all along, or at least it should have known...

NSH should have looked further than just the first company purchasing it. And, notably, you can be guilty or responsible for a civil infraction of sanctions, even if you don't know that what you're doing is violating the sanctions.

This is especially important, given that Russia is using some of these products from NSH to make weapons that are killing people on the battlefield in Ukraine...