6000 companies are trading with russian legal entities subject to sanctions

Journalists from The Insider have identified over six thousand firms conducting business with russian companies and defence industry suppliers featured on US, UK and EU sanctions lists. Around two-thirds of these are Chinese and Hong Kong-based companies, with the remainder including many Turkish, Emirati and Indian firms, the publication reported on Wednesday, 11 March, citing its own analysis of russian companies’ foreign trade data for 2024–2025.

It is noted that two-thirds of trade volumes with sanctioned firms and russian defence industry contractors are accounted for by China, Hong Kong, Turkey, India and the UAE.

Furthermore, The Insider’s authors identified several hundred russian importers who continued to purchase goods abroad after being blacklisted due to russia’s war against Ukraine. In doing so, they disregarded the risks faced by their foreign partners, who, in turn, disregarded the risks of bank blockades, the article notes.

The journalistic investigation also identified russian firms not appearing on sanctions lists but which resold foreign goods to the defence industry, as well as their own products based on purchased imported components. The Insider published a list of the foreign firms it identified that had conducted transactions with these russian companies.

The authors of the investigation cite as an example the supply to russia, in circumvention of sanctions, of more than a hundred turbojet engines worth three million dollars by the Chinese firm Henan New Silk Road International. The buyer was the company “Chipdevice”, which is on the blacklist. “A non-existent firm is listed as the manufacturer of the goods. The thrust of such engines is 80 kg, which allows them to be used on large military UAVs,” they note.

The main suppliers to sanctioned firms in russia are China and Turkey. As noted by The Insider, China leads both in the number of supplier firms to sanctioned and military russian companies, and in the gross value of goods imported for these firms. At the same time, the leader in terms of the quality of goods supplied to russian firms linked to the defence industry is Turkey, which specialises in reselling high-quality Western technology in russia.

“68 per cent of its supplies in the sector of the most high-tech goods (metalworking, non-consumer electronics, optics, equipment for metallurgy and energy, non-domestic measuring instruments) consists of high-end equipment manufactured in Europe, Japan and Korea,” journalists found.

Source: DW