Germany exposes supply scheme for Russian defense companies

A large-scale network that circumvented EU sanctions to supply goods to the Russian defense industry has been exposed in Germany. During the operation of the scheme, its participants made about 16,000 deliveries.

Reuters reports this.

The German Federal Prosecutor’s Office has arrested five suspects in the port city of Lübeck and the Herzogtum-Lauenburg district. The detainees include citizens of Germany, Ukraine and Russia.

The investigation found that since February 2022, the group has organized approximately 16,000 deliveries of goods for a total amount of about 30 million euros. According to law enforcement, the purchases were coordinated by Russian state structures, and the final recipients were 24 Russian defense companies.

The key link in the scheme was a trading company in Lübeck, controlled by one of the suspects with dual German-Russian citizenship. To disguise the exports, the network members used shell companies, fictitious recipients in EU countries and outside, as well as a shell structure in Russia.

Five other suspects remain at large. Law enforcement officers conducted searches in Frankfurt am Main and Nuremberg and froze assets in an amount corresponding to the volume of the illegal transactions.

Germany’s Finance Minister said that the exposure of this network demonstrates the country’s tough stance on enforcing EU sanctions and combating their circumvention.

It was previously reported that Russia has tripled the production of ballistic missiles for the Iskander-M operational-tactical complexes thanks to the supply of components from China.

As a reminder, Russia has begun modernizing the Petrozavodsk garrison of the military base in Karelia near the border with Finland.

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