TECHNOLOGY COMPETITIONRussia Working Hard to Acquire Sensitive Western Military Technology

By Mike Eckel

Published 21 October 2022

Russia has struggled for years, if not decades, to acquire sensitive Western technology and military hardware: everything from night-vision goggles for soldiers to powerful computer chips for advanced fighter jets. How successful the effort has been is an open question, but according to news reports and military analysts, sensitive Western technologies are widely employed in Russian weaponry and military equipment.

In late June 2019, a Russian man named Yury Orekhov met in a European hotel with a businessman representing a California-based company involved in consulting and logistics. Orekhov, the co-owner of a German industrial equipment and commodities trading company, told the businessman that he wanted to buy U.S. components to be used in a Russian Sukhoi fighter jet.

According to a U.S. federal indictment unsealed this week, Orekhov allegedly told the unnamed businessman that the paperwork would have to be falsified to show a fake Malaysian company was the purchaser, in order avoid U.S. export restrictions.

Not long after, a Russian woman who worked for Orekhov followed up with the businessman, requesting help to buy sensitive military technologies including “tactical air navigation interrogators and multi-mode receivers, radiation-hardened, military-grade two-terminal temperature transducers.”

The sale never went through, according to U.S. prosecutors — but others arranged by Orekhov’s company did, including “a variety of sensitive, military-grade technologies in five transactions totaling over $250,000” purchased from a New York company between 2018 and 2020.

Those and other details were listed in the indictment dated September 26 but unsealed this week, charging Orekhov and four other Russian citizens with a complex, multiyear scheme to secretly obtain U.S. military technology and circumvent export restrictions. Two other people were also charged in an unrelated scheme to sell Venezuelan oil.

The indictment offers a glimpse into how Russia has struggled for years, if not decades, to acquire sensitive Western technology and military hardware: everything from night-vision goggles for soldiers to powerful computer chips for advanced fighter jets.

How successful the effort has been is an open question. According to news reports and military analysts, sensitive Western technologies are widely employed in Russian weaponry and military equipment.

“Russia’s multibillion-dollar, decades-long military modernization program has depended on the extensive use of microelectronics manufactured in the U.S., Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the U.K., France, and Germany,” according to a report published in August by the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.

Orekhov was arrested in Germany on October 17, and U.S. prosecutors said they will seek his extradition. E-mails seeking further comment sent to his company, based in Hamburg, Germany, were not immediately replied to.