Parts made by U.S. companies allegedly used to build Russian cruise missiles; incl. cos. comments
Parts made by U.S. companies used to build Russian cruise missiles, 21 July 2023
Again...Ukraine suffered a barrage of Russian missile strikes, part of a deadly summer of attacks.
But as "NewsHour" special correspondent Simon Ostrovsky has discovered, many of the Russian-made cruise missiles wouldn't be able to find their targets without the help of American companies...
On June 12, a barrage of missiles, including Kh-101s, rained down on the city, hitting this apartment building...A total of 13 people were killed in the attack...
If you look at the outer casing of the flight control unit from this Kh-101 missile, then you see Russian writing, Russian parts all over it. It looks like a Russian computer. But once you open it up and start looking at the motherboards that are hidden inside, put it underneath the electronic microscope, then you start to see what the brains of this machine are actually made of. And it's full of American components.
If we look here, we see imported components and not a single domestically made one. This is Altera. This is analog devices, Texas Instruments...
In this instrument alone, we found products made by five American companies, the most recently manufactured of which is this Xilinx Spartan-6 microchip made by Santa Clara, California-based AMD in 2020. The company told NewsHour it had no record of the sale of the chip and suspected the markings on it may have been altered. Microchips manufactured after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine started have also turned up in Kh-101s, like these Zilog processors made in March of 2022 and recovered from a missile shut down in the city of Dnipro in March of 2023...
James Byrne, a director at the Royal United Services Institute in London and one of the authors of a report on the Russian defense industry's reliance on imported semiconductors, echoed the Ukrainian view that there was a little obvious enforcement of Russia sanctions. I don't believe there has been any such action. We did have huge fines on some of the large financial institutions. And they were ultimately for essentially practices, failures in due diligence. So it's certainly a possibility that something like this could happen, particularly if it's — if it continues or if it emerges that some companies really didn't follow any sort of due diligence...
Texas Instruments told NewsHour it complies with the law and doesn't support or condone the use of its products and — quote — "applications for which they weren't designed"...