State Department: Armenia and several other countries help Russia circumvent sanctions

Exports of key microchips and electronics that Russia needs for its war machine are back to pre-war levels, as Russia has gotten better at circumventing sanctions, Jim O’Brien, sanctions coordinator at the U.S. State Department, said o June 7.

The problem, O’Brien said, is that European companies are selling to other countries, which in turn resell the materials to Russia. “By the start of this year, Russia was able to reimport certain key categories of electronics at about pre-war levels,” O’Brien told Politico, referring to chips, processors, and integrated circuits key to making modern weapons. 

O’Brien said the U.S. has identified five countries in particular that are causing the circumvention problem: Armenia, Türkiye, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United Arab Emirates.

EU countries are working on the 11th sanctions package against Russia, which would focus on anti-circumvention of the existing sanctions and include a new mechanism to potentially punish countries outside of the EU that enable sanction evasion.