A tiny Austrian sensor designed for precision motion control traveled from a Hong Kong distributor into the guidance system of a Russian attack drone launched against Ukraine — manufactured after the full-scale invasion began, after the sanctions were imposed, after the world declared it would cut Russia off from the technologies of war.
That sensor is not an outlier. It is a pattern.
A joint investigation by the Kyiv Independent, OCCRP, De Tijd, Paper Trail Media, Standard, The Times, The Irish Times, and InfoLibre has documented Western, American, Japanese, and Taiwanese components inside Russian-produced Geran-2 drones — including parts manufactured in 2024 and 2025, more than two years after Russia's full-scale invasion and well into the sanctions regime intended to deny Moscow precisely these materials.
The findings transform what might be framed as a story of Ukrainian victimhood into a story of Western institutional failure — not malice, perhaps, but negligence with lethal consequences for civilians sheltering from drone strikes across Ukraine.
The Geran-2 is Russia's workhorse long-range strike drone, a domestically produced version of the Iranian Shahed-136 that Moscow acquired the technology to manufacture after 2022. It has become the most widely deployed unmanned aerial vehicle for striking targets deep inside Ukrainian territory — cities, energy infrastructure, railway hubs. Ukrainian military intelligence provided the investigation with documentation from the remnants of several Geran-2 drones recovered in Ukraine, and those documents tell a damning story.
The components inside include parts from American, European, Japanese, and Taiwanese manufacturers. Alongside Russian and Chinese-sourced materials, the drones carry electronics from companies operating under the very export control regimes designed to prevent exactly this outcome. The investigation analyzed Russian customs records documenting relevant shipments and contacted the Western manufacturers directly.
The mechanism of circumvention is well-documented by sanctions specialists: goods travel from legitimate manufacturers to distributors in third countries — Hong Kong, Turkey, UAE, and others — where they are re-exported to Russia with altered documentation or through shell companies. Export controls require end-use verification, but enforcement capacity across global supply chains remains chronically inadequate.
Ukrainian intelligence officials who spoke to the investigation described a system in which Western governments announce sanctions while the compliance architecture needed to enforce them lags by years. The OCCRP's credibility as a cross-border investigative consortium — with a track record on financial crime and sanctions evasion across multiple jurisdictions — gives the findings institutional weight that a single-outlet report would not carry.
What makes the 2024 and 2025 manufacture dates significant is precisely their timing. These are not components acquired before the war, stockpiled in Russian warehouses, and gradually drawn down. They entered Russia's supply chain during the conflict, demonstrating that the evasion networks remain active and effective despite tightening Western enforcement measures.
The drones assembled from these components fly into the night sky above Odesa, Kharkiv, Kyiv, and dozens of other Ukrainian cities. Each interception requires air defense missiles that cost multiples more than the drones themselves. Each that breaks through kills or maims civilians, destroys power infrastructure, collapses apartment buildings.
The EU introduced anti-circumvention provisions in recent sanctions packages, extending liability to third-country distributors who knowingly reroute restricted goods. Whether those provisions are being enforced with sufficient intensity is a question the investigation leaves pointedly open.
For Ukraine, the findings are not surprising. Ukrainian engineers have been disassembling downed Russian drones and documenting their Western components since 2022, building a body of evidence that has grown more damning with each new batch. What the OCCRP-led investigation adds is the customs records — documentary proof of supply chain paths, not just endpoint findings — and the confirmation of continued supply through 2025.
The manufacturers contacted largely stated they had no knowledge their products were being used in Russian weapons systems and that they comply with export control laws in their jurisdictions. That response is legally defensible. Whether it is adequate to the moment is a different question.
In Ukraine, as across nations defending their sovereignty, resilience is not just survival — it is determination to build a better future. But resilience cannot substitute for the enforcement mechanisms that were promised and have not been delivered. Every Austrian sensor, every American microchip, every Japanese component recovered from a downed Geran-2 is evidence of a gap between Western declarations and Western actions — a gap measured in Ukrainian lives.
