German automaker BMW pulled out of Russia days after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but today luxury SUVs, assembled without authorization from BMW, are being sold to Russian customers with deep pockets and a high risk tolerance.
"BMW-shaped" cars assembled in Russia first appeared in March 2025. The vehicles were made from parts left behind when the German company abruptly ended its decades-long partnership with Avtotor, an auto plant in the exclave of Kaliningrad.
Russian media outlets have claimed 145 "pirated" BMWs assembled at Avtotor were sold in Russia last year. The vehicles are distinctive because they carry 2025 production dates but retain the styling of 2022 models. BMW unveiled design "facelifts" to its X series vehicles between 2022 and 2024.
Carolin Bachmann, a spokesperson for the BMW Group told RFE/RL that Avtotor, “began producing limited batches of BMW cars in 2025, assembling vehicles from old, partially outdated kits that had remained at its disposal since the termination of cooperation in 2022.”
The unauthorized assembly has continued, “on an irregular basis to date,” Bachmann said in an e-mail, adding that "to address and mitigate the risks associated with the purchase and use of these unauthorized vehicles, we have briefed all parties involved including public authorities, retailers and potential customers, and clarified the circumstances."
The three models of unauthorized BMW SUVs assembled in Kaliningrad are priced between 11.9 and 12.9 million rubles ($153,000 and $166,000) for base versions. That is millions of rubles cheaper than equivalent BMWs imported to the sanctioned country through "gray market" schemes, in which cars are bought from a dealer in another country then shipped into Russia and sold as new.
Christopher Ludwig, a UK-based auto industry expert told RFE/RL via e-mail that even with leftover official BMW parts to work with, the Kaliningrad facility would have faced significant hurdles to produce the bootleg vehicles.
"The lack of engineering and process oversight from BMW would mean that vehicles are assembled without direct technical input, which at a minimum would raise potential quality issues," said Ludwig, who heads Automotive Logistics and other auto industry publications.
"One of the key complexities in many modern vehicles is managing the different electronic control units and software across different parts and in overall systems," he said. "This software certainly would have been decoupled from BMW directly and so would either not be able to be updated, or has been reprogrammed or substituted."
Russian sellers marketing the Kaliningrad cars have touted this software decoupling as a feature, not a bug, pointing out that the cars cannot be "bricked" by BMW programmers who could potentially remotely deactivate cars plugged into official software.
Russian media outlets have claimed that some simple parts, such as hoses and wiring, are being produced in Russia for the unlicensed BMWs, and that in recent months, mechanical parts have been sourced from unnamed suppliers to supplement the 2022 inventory.
Ludwig said BMW is unable to track vehicle components indefinitely, meaning parts could be sourced, "through different foreign entities and countries, whether Central Asia, China, the Middle East or other countries that have still maintained trading ties." According to Ludwig, such a fiddly supply chain and assembly process, "would all likely be more costly and less efficient," but is "not impossible."
Tbilisi-based economist Vakhtang Partsvaniya, who has written extensively on Russian sanctions evasion, agrees with that assessment.
"Technically, it is possible that some BMW parts or compatible components continue to reach Russia through gray market channels, intermediaries, or parallel imports," he told RFE/RL in an e-mail, adding that "Russia has developed many such routes since 2022."
However, one recent claim -- that Avtotor had begun assembling the diesel BMW X6 40d, a model supposedly never before produced at the Kaliningrad factory -- left industry experts scratching their heads.
With limited overlap between models, sourcing all components for a vehicle never made in Kaliningrad would be a mammoth undertaking. Automotive supply chains generally involve hundreds of suppliers providing tens of thousands of parts needed for each individual vehicle.
So how is the Russian plant able to produce a vehicle not made at the plant before?
The answer is: it isn’t.
BMW has not publicly addressed this specific claim, but online records indicate it is false.
A widely cited May 2026 video claimed that X6 40d vehicles were being assembled at the Avtotor plant for the first time. But several comments beneath the video challenged that assertion, and one included evidence that disproved it.
“You say in the video that the X6 40d was never assembled in [Kaliningrad], so how come I bought a new one in August 2016?" One viewer wrote. The commenter then provided the car's full vehicle identification number (VIN). Online tools for checking VINs shows the diesel-engined vehicle was indeed assembled in Kaliningrad in June 2016.
Registrations of new BMWs inside Russia have risen markedly in recent months, but the latest Russian automotive data does not specify where the German-designed cars were produced.
If Russian reports of high demand for the Kaliningrad-assembled BMWs are accurate, production of the unlicensed vehicles may continue for a long time to come.
Logistics expert Ludwig said that Avtotor, where more than 261,000 BMWs were assembled between October 1999 and early 2022, would probably have had "an end-to-end supply chain of at least 3 months and quite likely 6 months or more," he said.
While stressing that such estimates can only be speculation, he said, "if the plant was producing 1,000 vehicles a month before, but is now only producing 50, then even three months of pre-2022 stock would last five years."
A Russian auto industry insider who spoke to RFE/RL on condition of anonymity said the current rate of production of unlicensed BMWs is "a drop in the ocean" compared to the output of the factory before 2022, but he adds, "it'll be interesting if new [post facelift] bodies appear and things really start moving."
