US busts network providing technology to Russian military

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Wednesday announced a round of criminal charges and sanctions related to a complicated scheme to procure military technologies from U.S. manufacturers and illegally supply them to Russia for its war in Ukraine. The Justice Department charged nearly a dozen people in separate cases in New York and Connecticut, including Russian nationals accused of purchasing sensitive military technologies from U.S. companies and laundering tens of millions of dollars for wealthy Russian businessmen; Latvians accused of conspiring to smuggle equipment to Russian and oil brokers for Venezuela accused of working on illicit deals for a Venezuelan state-owned oil company. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced sanctions Wednesday against one of the men charged by the Justice Department, designating Yury Orekhov and two of his firms, Nord-Deutsche Industrieanlagenbau GmbH and Opus Energy Trading LLC, for procuring advanced semiconductors and microprocessors used in fighter aircraft and ballistic and hypersonic missile systems among other military uses. The Justice Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control worked in coordination to identify the Russian network. Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in a statement Wednesday that Russia has increasingly struggled to get the technologies it needs to sustain the war “thanks to the unprecedented sanctions and export controls imposed by our broad coalition of partners and allies.” “We know these efforts are having a direct effect on the battlefield,” he said, “as Russia’s desperation has led them to turn to inferior suppliers and outdated equipment.” Information from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, presented Friday at the Treasury Department, said Russia has lost more than 6,000 pieces of equipment since the beginning of the war in late February and is turning to Iran and North Korea for supplies.