How can Russia keep producing weapons with foreign parts despite sanctions?

During the first two weeks of September, Russia launched over 640 Shahed drones at Ukrainian cities, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

And Moscow won't run out of them any time soon as microchips, semiconductors and other microelectronics from China, the US and the EU are still being found in Russian drones and missiles launched at Ukraine.

Vladyslav Vlasiuk, Zelenskyy's advisor and commissioner for sanctions policy, said Moscow has still been able to replenish its war machine, although the sanctions did impact it.

"Russians are still quite able to acquire those parts and produce the weapons, including missiles and drones. We also are quite happy that the Russians are receiving less parts than they want and they are paying much higher price than they wanted to," Vlasiuk told Euronews. 

The EU sanctions envoy, David O'Sullivan, has more details and numbers: "We estimate that in some cases for microelectronics it is now 125% more expensive than it was, in some cases 300% more expensive. So this all together constitutes a considerable damage to the Russian military industrial complex."

He says one of the key steps in making it possible is identifying the list of the priority battlefield products, done by the Kyiv scientific research institute of forensic expertise.  

Nataliia Nestor, Deputy Director of the Kyiv Scientific Research Institute of Forensic Expertise (KSRIFE) of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine, said that throughout last year, the institute's experts conducted about 30,000 studies related to the facts of Russia's military aggression against Ukraine.

According to her, they studied almost all types of missiles Russia uses to attack Ukraine: Iskander, Kinzhal, Kalibr, Kh-101, Kh-55, Kh-59, and others.

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