The United States has imposed sanctions on a Russian firm that RFE/RL found had received hundreds of shipments from Kazakhstan of dual-use technology that Western governments say Russia is using in weapons it is deploying in its war against Ukraine.
The St. Petersburg-based electronics dealer Streloi E-Kommerts is among the raft of companies and individuals hit by U.S. sanctions on December 12 in what the U.S. Treasury Department called its latest move to target Russia's military procurement networks.
"The Kremlin has steadily turned Russia into a wartime economy, but Putin's war machine cannot survive on domestic production alone," U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement.
"Our sanctions today continue to tighten the vise on willing third-country suppliers and networks providing Russia the inputs it desperately needs to ramp up and sustain its military-industrial base."
An RFE/RL investigation in June found that following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Streloi E-Kommerts received hundreds of shipments of dual-use goods from Elem Group, an affiliated company based in Kazakhstan's financial capital, Almaty.
Of these shipments, 273 listed types of sanctioned dual-use goods that have been deemed by Washington and its European partners as "high-priority" for export controls to Russia because of their use in "Russian weapons system components recovered on the battlefield in Ukraine."
Elem Group, which said it did not believe it was helping Russia circumvent sanctions, was incorporated in Kazakhstan less than three weeks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. One of the founders, Russian businessman Kirill Tulyakov, was a founder of Streloi E-Kommerts.
Western officials have pressured Kazakhstan and other Central Asian governments not party to international sanctions on Russia to halt the flow of Western dual-use technology, such as microchips and telecommunications equipment, to Russia's military-industrial complex.