20 June 2024

...In the third year of the war and under dozens of sanctions lists, Russia still manages to obtain European materials, including for the manufacture of “shaheds”.

Slidstvo.Info journalists have learned how German companies are apparently not averse to working with Russian criminals...

Russian Shaheds are manufactured at enterprises in Alabuga, a free economic zone in Russia located in Tatarstan. It is there that Russian companies use Iranian technology for their own drone production...

There have been several leaks from Alabuga. Earlier, the Washington Post wrote that Alabuga plans to produce 6,000 drones by the summer of 2025. And according to the Wall Street Journal, at the end of April this year, the plant was ahead of schedule, having delivered 4,500 drones to the Russian army. 

The leak also revealed that the Russians used coded names in their correspondence and other documents: drones were called “motor boats” and explosives were called “bumpers”. And the Shahed-136 UAV, which is labelled as the Geranium-2 in Russia, is referred to in the documents as the Dolphin 632 motorboat...

The journalists of Slidstvo.Info have also seen the documents of this leak. In addition to real drone schematics, it contains a presentation entitled “Boat production project”. It shows how much material is needed to make each product. 

It also lists potential suppliers of these materials. The information on the slides refers to April 2023 at the latest...

Slidstvo.Info decided to check the customs data of the companies declared as suppliers of components for the Shahed. In most cases, the main foreign partners of these companies are firms from China, South Korea and Turkey. But there are also several companies from Germany. 

In particular, according to customs data, Composite Izdelia LLC purchases epoxy resin from two German companies — R&G Faserverbundwerkstoffe and Goettle Advanced Products Gmbh & Co.Kg...

They supplied epoxy to Russia at the peak of the war — in 2022 and 2023. 

It can be assumed that the companies were unaware of Composite Izdeliya’s cooperation with Alabuga for various reasons. Either they did not see the leak, or they were not informed about it, or they did not ask. 

However, the companies could have checked the Russian counterparty and seen the connection to the Russian military-industrial complex. 

“When you ask a European business: “Yes, but what did you do to see this?” Someone might say, “Well, we have a sanctions check. Our lawyers ran our client through the sanctions database and saw that the company was not under sanctions, and that was the end of the check.” In other words, the business does not take into account the fact that it is no longer enough to simply check the sanctions database.  The only participant in this whole sanctions story who is directly involved in these supplies is checking whether or not to sign the contract,” explains Roman Steblivskyi, Head of Sanctions at Trap Aggressor...