Exports of goods from Britain, including components and parts for missiles and drones, to countries neighboring Russia have increased by hundreds of percent since the beginning of 2022 — after the Russian Federation's large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
What is known about the supply of missiles from Britain to the Russian Federation
By 2022, British companies were sending quite a lot of goods worth around £3 billion a year to Russia. All this was supposed to end after February 2022... Politicians and wealthy businessmen were put on the sanctions list, Russian foreign bonds were frozen, and the export of thousands of categories of goods to Russia was banned... These initial sanctions were mostly reduced to starving the military Vladimir Putin's car, depriving it of funding and components necessary for the production of weapons, drones, radar equipment, etc., the author writes.
Goods do not arrive directly
However, it is noted that goods from Britain continue to arrive in Russia, although not directly, but from neighboring countries:
Enterprising Ukrainians methodically analyzed the components of Russian weapons. What they found was startling: thousands of components produced in Western countries, including the UK, long after the war had started... The figures I pulled from the HMRC database were some of the most impressive I've ever seen. I have seen in all the years of working as a journalist. They showed that our exports to the former Soviet states had increased to an unprecedented level — by thousands of percent... The deeper I dug into the data, the more alarming it became.
For example, exports of components used in Russian military systems to Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Uzbekistan are reported to have increased by more than 500% since the beginning of 2022.
Drone and helicopter parts, aeronautical equipment and advanced optics worth millions of pounds — the very goods we should not be shipping anywhere near Russia — were all shipped from British factories to countries bordering Russia, the editor noted.
According to him, the British government says it is "doing everything it can to stop these flows, but it seems to be fighting a losing battle, money always seems to win."
