American-made electronics are still being found in russian military aircraft

russia continues to obtain U.S.-made microelectronics despite strict export controls. Those chips – including some from manufacturers with Arizona facilities – end up in advanced fighter jets used against Ukraine and linked with alleged war crimes.

 

That’s according to a recent report from the Independent Anti-Corruption Commission, the International Partnership for Human Rights and Hunterbrook Media.

 

The report found that components made by U.S. industry giants such as Analog Devices, Texas Instruments and Intel have been found in the cockpits and avionics bays of SU-34 and SU-35 fighters – the “workhorses” of Moscow’s precision bombing campaigns in Ukraine.

 

The report looked at 60 air strikes on civilian infrastructure from May 2023 to May 2024 and analyzed over 180,000 customs shipment records.

 

Based in part on studying downed Russian jets, the researchers found 1,119 microelectronic components made by 141 different Western companies. Nearly all were made in the U.S.: 68% of those found in SU-34s and 62% of those found in SU-35s.

 

The vast majority of those companies are based in the United States and many have operations in Arizona.

 

Many of the western components found in Russian warplanes are classified as high priority by the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security. Such items are banned for sale to russia and are subject to strict export regulations.

 

Two-thirds of the western-made components found in SU-34s fall in that category, including field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) made by Intel and specialized integrated circuits made by Analog Devices.

 

While all of the components should be off-limits to russia, 6% are regarded by the BIS as especially sensitive to U.S. national security.

 

The investigation does not allege any wrongdoing by the manufacturers. But it does highlight how ineffective current sanctions and export controls have been at stanching the flow of microelectronics critical to the russian war machine.

 

“Governments must implement harsher sanctions against Russia, and manufacturers must introduce higher due diligence and supply chain control standards to prevent their products’ diversion into russia’s weapons,” wrote Anastasiya Donets, lead of Ukraine legal team at IPHR.

 

In a statement to Cronkite News, NXP, which makes ceramic capacitors and microprocessors found in the fighter jets, operates two manufacturing facilities in Chandler. The company denied any wrongdoing and said it is committed to ensuring that its products do not end up in the hands of U.S. adversaries.

 

“NXP does not tolerate the sale, export, or re-export, directly or indirectly, of NXP products to the russian federation, North Korea, Iran, and Belarus, nor the use of NXP products in these countries,” the company told Cronkite News in a written statement. “Additionally, NXP has not been found to have violated any export control or sanction laws.”

 

Memory chips produced by AMD, some of which are fabricated in Phoenix at the huge Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company plant, were also found in russian warplanes.

 

TSMC declined to comment on the finding.

 

Last September, representatives from AMD, Intel, Texas Instruments and Analog Devices testified before a Senate investigative subcommittee.

 

“We found companies’ efforts to track the path of their chips into russia to be slow, unhelpful, or nonexistent,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who chaired the panel at the time, said at the hearing, titled “The US Companies’ Technology Fueling the russian War Machine.”

 

The panel’s investigators found that the companies exercised too little oversight over its distributors, he said, adding that “our investigation shows that the excuses offered by companies to explain the presence of their products in russia ring hollow.”

 

Ten months later, he remains dissatisfied with efforts by the tech companies and law enforcement.

 

“Safeguards have to be strengthened, and most importantly, they have to be enforced,” Blumenthal said in an interview at the Capitol last week.

 

The subcommittee’s current chair, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., was somewhat less troubled by the report.

 

“I don’t view it as particularly sinister. I just view it as hard to track all these parts,” he told Cronkite News. “You can’t control everything. If you try to control everything, people completely lose freedom.”

 

Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, acknowledged that controlling where U.S. components end up is extremely hard.

 

“It is a problem that we’re aware of, and we’re trying to deal with it. It’s not easy, though. I mean, you can take a circuit board out of a washing machine and put it in a missile,” he told Cronkite News.

 

At the September hearing, the four companies in the spotlight pledged to strengthen their compliance efforts but said it’s a big challenge. Once their chips and other components are sold – legally – into the global market, they can change hands multiple times, making them almost impossible to trace.

 

russia has managed to circumvent sanctions and export controls in part by using sophisticated supply-chain networks and with help from China, according to the recent report.

 

“Ten percent of this problem is about Western chip firms’ compliance efforts, which I think are insufficient. But 90% is about Beijing’s active support of russia’s war effort,” said Chris Miller, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the book Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology.

 

Miller agreed that it’s difficult for tech companies to track, let alone control, what their Chinese customers do with their purchases. U.S. chips purportedly bought for civilian purposes can be repurposed by the russian military.

 

“We should put more pressure on China to stop aiding Russia’s military,” Miller said. “Beijing is russia’s most important technology partner and is actively supporting the development of russian military power.”

 

President Donald Trump recently gave Moscow a 50-day deadline to reach a peace deal with Kyiv, threatening secondary sanctions on India, China and other countries that buy its oil, natural gas and other products. Such sanctions would be far more impactful on the russian economy than the direct sanctions in place for the last three years.

 

All but 17 senators have co-sponsored a bill to impose a 500% tariff on countries that buy russian oil, uranium and other exports. Kelly and fellow Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallego back the measure.

 

In 2024, China imported 2.2 million barrels of russian crude oil per day, worth over $62 billion for the year, according to United Nations trade data.

 

“We should give Ukraine what it needs to defend itself, and in time, with the right assistance combined with sanctions, tariffs” and secondary sanctions, “we could put russia in a situation where this is an untenable thing for them going forward,” Kelly said.

 

Source: Cronkite News