THE REST OF THE WEST IN RUSSIA

January 2, 2023 -Durt Fibo

Sanctions or public relations or sheer profit drops have pressured a great number of Western corporations we’ve heard about to abandon their operations in Russia over the last slow year. But a possibly comparable amount of them are content to remain. Those companies manufacture leading brand-name consumer goods that sustain a basic functionality of the Russian economy -and prolong the complacency of the Russian populace.

Equally dismaying is the continuing presence of those goods in Ukrainian stores, and groups have begun approaching the Ukrainian Rada and the office of the President with proposals to clearly label products considered tainted by the connection.

As recently as December, 2022, Yale University, Forbes, and the Kyiv School of Economics separately found roughly 1,000 international businesses still operating in Russia, including Western shelf-brands such as Benetton Group, Colgate-Palmolive, Hochland AG, Red Bull, Société Bic, Nestlé SA, Avon Products, Inc., Cargill, Mondelez International, Procter & Gamble, Unilever plc, Alfred Ritter GmbH & Co. KG, Lactalis, Barilla Holding SpA, Johnson & Johnson, Yves Rocher, Perfetti Van Melle, HiPP GmbH & Company Vertrieb KG, and others. These are only consumer-level items, so this list above does not enumerate, international tech and speculative schemes, fast food outlets, or companies creating the larger or industrial products still operating within Russia [eg, Yamaha, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Hoffmann Group].

Most of the companies above, of course, continue to sell their products on the shelves of Russian shops, which means large-scale production is a necessity for them, and a correlative facilitation of the Russian markets. As legal subsidiaries or resident headquarters, they also pay taxes to the Russian state. As all the foregoing funds Putin’s unsportsmanlike leisure activities, the decreed realigning of all industry towards Dmitry Medvedev’s Ministry of Armaments and War Production (see our Dec, 27, 2022 article: “MEDVEDEV: THE RIGHT MAN FOR SOME JOB”) further means that every one of these Western corporations can be put in the position of manufacturing specifically for the war effort.

But all that is a matter for those Ukraine neighborhoods or cities where shops still stand. Or where customers can still be found alive. A far more lethal infraction of sanctions is the selling, or ‘transferring’ of Western components recurringly found in Russian weapons. Compiling field reports from early phases of the war, through August, and again up through December of 2022, international groups (among them: CAR, RUSI, and Trap Aggressor) have uncovered between 318 to 450 Western-made parts in Russian armaments, from the smallest drone to the most dreadful missile. One American company which claims to no longer have a presence in Russia is Texas Instruments (others say its subsidiary is still operative in Moscow as Texas Instruments Russia Sales), which has had its processors found in Iranian Shahed-131 kamikaze drones, and components in Iskander and KH-101 cruise missiles, as well as Kamov KA-52 helicopters (“Alligators”). Other USA components discovered in those, and more weaponry, clearly came from Analog Devices, Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Micron Technology. There is no suspicion that any of those manufacturers apart from the ambiguously ambiguous Texas Instruments are still manufacturing in Russia.

Western contributions to the Russian arsenal come from an estimated 69 companies, including the Netherlands, Japan, France, Germany, Switzerland and Taiwan. However, the discovery of these multi-national components is not conclusive proof of every manufacturer’s sanction-slipping. Many of the weapons disassembled revealed a chaotic solyanka of parts, which in fact would explain much of the weapons’ erratic results -they appear to’ve been thrown all together, whether compatible or not. Thus, Russia would be flinging leftovers into the neighbors’ yards. Some of the improvisation naturally came about when time became scarce and too much looted (and sold) matériel was suddenly due at point X. Other bits came, and will come, through devious channels; there is the ancient art of evasion legally contingent upon what shippers call ‘the end user,’ and what others call a ‘cut-out’ or middleman. And then there is the marvel of open capitalism, wherein first- and second-hand suppliers proliferate on the internet. One such noble grub was offering on his Russian website all summer “chips, microcontrollers, and other electronics from Infineon Technologies, Analog Devices, Microchip Technology, Murata Manufacturing, Nexperia, and TDK Electronics.” Whether they were new -provided to him from the Western manufacturers via the ‘end user’ scheme- or old, looted parts, or simply warehoused remains from the pre-sanction days, I did not test.