Reuters: As Russian missiles struck Ukraine, Western tech still flowed

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the West announced tough new sanctions and tech companies said they had halted all exports to Russia. Yet supplies of Western computer parts continued, a joint investigation finds.

• But many of the most important electronic components inside are microcontrollers, programmable chips and signal processors stamped with the names of American chip-makers, including Texas Instruments Inc; Altera, owned by Intel Corporation; Xilinx, owned by Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) and Maxim Integrated Products Inc, acquired last year by Analog Devices Inc. Chips made by Cypress Semiconductor, now owned by Germany’s Infineon Technologies AG, were also visible.
• A review by Reuters of Russian customs records identified more than 15,000 shipments of Western electronic components that reached Russia after its Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine through the end of May. The manufacturers included AMD, Analog Devices, Infineon, Intel and Texas Instruments.

Gehan Amaratunga, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Cambridge, reviewed a list of more than 600 Western components compiled by RUSI and Reuters that were found in Russian weapons and military systems recovered in Ukraine. “They are mostly standard products which are dated and can be found in many industrial electronic systems. As such, they are not specialist military specification products. It is the reality that all standard integrated circuits can be used for both civilian and military purposes.”