Special Report: How U.S. export limits allow military technology to reach Russia

According to his own account, Moscow businessman Ilias Sabirov had been supplying Russia’s military with high-performance computer chips manufactured in the United States for years.

Then, in 2014, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine, prompting the United States to impose a slew of new sanctions and export controls on Russia, including a ban on the sale of such chips.

That didn’t stop Sabirov from collecting more, according to Russian customs data obtained by US authorities.

According to Russian customs records and a U.S. federal indictment, in the spring of 2015, a parcel containing more than 100 memory chips specially hardened to resist radiation and extreme temperatures – critical components in missiles and military satellites – arrived at Sabirov’s business address in Moscow. The “rad-hard”chips, according to American prosecutors, were sourced from Silicon Space Technology Corp, or SST, in Austin, Texas, but delivered to Russia via a Bulgarian firm to avoid violating US export laws.

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