Suspects charged in alleged schemes to send US technology to Russia

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The US Justice Department charged nearly a dozen people and two companies allegedly in connection with plans to send military technology to Russia, some of which was supposedly recovered from Ukrainian battlefields.

Some of the defendants reportedly attempted to send "nuclear proliferation technology" to Russia, but it was intercepted before it arrived, as per the US department.

In a statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland said: “These charges reveal two separate global schemes to violate U.S. export and sanctions laws, including by shipping sensitive military technologies from U.S. manufacturers – including types found in seized Russian weapons platforms in Ukraine – and attempting to reexport a machine system with potential application in nuclear proliferation and defense programs to Russia.” 

“As I have said, our investigators and prosecutors will be relentless in their efforts to identify, locate, and bring to justice those whose illegal acts undermine the rule of law and enable the Russian regime to continue its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,” Garland added.

It is worth noting that the charges were laid out in two separate indictments that detailed two separate plans to allegedly bring weapons technology and other goods into Russia.

Read more: Exclusive: NATO spying on Russian forces via satellites

US disappointment with low sanction effectiveness against Russia - CNN

Sentiments of disappointment emerge amongst US officials regarding the lack of "significant effects" resulting from the sanctions imposed on Russia despite expanding according to a CNN report that cited US senior officials.

The report asserted that Washington had expected that the Russian economy would be in a worse state than where it currently stands given that the anti-Russia sanctions have expanded in scope and intensity since the start of the Ukraine war.

One senior US official cited in the report argued that “We were expecting that things like SWIFT and all the blocking sanctions on Russia’s banks would totally crater the Russian economy and that basically, by now going into September, we’d be dealing with an economically much more weakened Russia than the one that we are dealing with.”

Moreover, the official explained that the initial approach towards anti-Russia sanctions led by the US will be “a mid-to-long term sanctions regime,” adding that the reason "is because we wanted to keep pressure on Russia over the long term as it waged war on Ukraine, and we wanted to degrade Russia’s economic and industrial capabilities. So we’ve always seen this as a long-term game.”