“NYT”: US aircraft parts worth millions of dollars were sent to Russia in 2022 despite sanctions

Russian customs records show millions of dollars worth of aircraft parts from Boeing, Airbus and others were shipped to Russia in 2022, despite sanctions against the country over the invasion of Ukraine; the process enables Russians living in the US, reports the New York Times.

Data collected by “NYT” show that over 5,000 people arrived in Russia in eight months of 2022. single shipments of aircraft parts, from simple bolts to a Honeywell aircraft engine starter, valued at $290,000 dollars. A total of $14.4 million worth of parts were shipped to Russia during this period; the value of parts marked as manufactured by Boeing was $8.9 million. The recipients of these deliveries were Rossiya, Aeroflot, Ural, S7, Utair and Pobeda lines.

Boeing announces that it has fully complied with U.S. sanctions against Russia and has suspended deliveries of parts, maintenance and technical support to customers in Russia in the first half of 2022.

Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US and some 40 countries have cooperated in imposing sanctions on Russia, including limiting Moscow’s access to weapons, computer chips, aircraft parts and other goods needed to fuel the country’s economy and wage war. Russian airlines such as Aeroflot, Rossiya and others were also subject to sanctions.

Aircraft parts deliveries, however, are made possible by illegal networks that have sprung up to circumvent restrictions by moving goods through intermediaries, often located in the Middle East and Asia. Dozens of shipments of copper wires, screws, graphite and other parts, marked as made in the US by Boeing, ended up at Aeroflot warehouses last year. They traveled through shady companies, free trade zones and industrial parks in the UAE and China, before finally ending up in Russia.

One of the people involved in helping Russia avoid the sanctions was Oleg Paculja, a Russian living near Miami, Florida. Last August, Paculja contacted a Russian airline that had been cut off from Western technology and materials, offering to help circumvent sanctions on Rossiya and to move aircraft parts and electronics needed by the company with headquarters in Florida, Turkey and Russia, he describes in Monday American Daily.

“In light of the sanctions imposed on the Russian Federation, we are successfully solving the upcoming challenges,” Paculja wrote, advertising his services. He and his business partner were detained on Thursday on charges of violating export control laws and global money laundering. The case illustrates the global networks helping Russia bypass the most extensive technological control systems in history.

Most of the products entered Russia via countries such as the UAE, Turkey, China and the Maldives, but many were shipped directly from the US or Europe. Their numbers have increased over the past year as Russia recruited global buyers to help evade sanctions, the New York Times believes. Despite the fact that it is successful, deliveries of aircraft parts to Russia remain at a much lower level than before the outbreak of the war. According to US government information, Russian airlines were forced to disassemble their planes to obtain spare parts for other machines and turned to Iran for parts and service.

According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, a data visualization platform that studies global trade dynamics, Russia’s imports of aircraft and aircraft parts fell from $3.45 billion a year before the invasion to around $286 million after the invasion began. China accounts for about half of all such shipments to Russia, followed by India. (PAP)

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