April 29 (Reuters) - By his own account, Ilias Sabirov, a Moscow businessman, had supplied Russia's military with high-performance computer chips made in the United States for years.
Then, in 2014, Russia seized the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, and the U.S. government began imposing a series of new sanctions and export controls on Russia, including severely restricting sales of such chips.
But that didn't stop Sabirov from obtaining more, according to U.S. authorities and a Reuters review of Russian customs records.
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, according to the Russian customs records and a U.S. federal indictment. American prosecutors allege that the "rad-hard"chips were sourced from a company in Austin, Texas, called Silicon Space Technology Corp, or SST, but shipped to Russia via a firm in Bulgaria to evade U.S. export law.
After Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, the United States and more than 30 other nations responded with an unprecedented barrage of additional sanctions and export restrictions. But the story of how the American chips made it from Texas to Moscow back in 2015 shows how sensitive Western technology can still end up in Russia despite strict U.S. export controls.
This account of the criminal case against Sabirov...
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