re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict.

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Technological advances often reach both sides at roughly the same time. “We might see a new video transmitter on Russian drones, and we will understand immediately what company in China produced it,” says Oleksiy Babenko of Vyriy Drone, another large supplier to the Ukrainian military. “So we write to them. Of course, they say, ‘No, it’s not ours.’ But we ask again and they say, ‘OK, we can sell it to you too.’”

The same process works in reverse, he adds. “We ask them to produce something specific for us, and a week later they send the samples to Russia and then start to produce the same thing for them.”

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Officially, China is neutral in the conflict and has banned exports of sensitive drone technology to both Russia and Ukraine. But western intelligence sources and Ukrainian policymakers charge that China’s government puts its thumb on the scale, even allowing better-funded Russian companies to buy entire production lines for relocation to Russia, despite western sanctions and Chinese export controls.

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Ukraine is working to localise production of drones, but Yakovenko says [Ukraaine] remains dependent on China for about 85 per cent of the components that go into simple first-person view drones, which are piloted by remote operators assisted by onboard cameras and often used for kamikaze strikes.

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China already makes 70-80 per cent of the world’s commercial drones and dominates production of critical elements such as speed controllers, sensors, cameras and propellers, according to analytics provider Drone Industry Insights.

That has made it a hidden fulcrum in the conflict. “It just puts into perspective how much control the Chinese actually have over the outcome of this war,” says Catarina Buchatskiy of the Snake Island Institute, a Kyiv-based military think-tank.

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Buchatskiy also says that Russia “has been doing a lot of relocation of Chinese factories — they’re buying up the supply lines and then because they’ve always outbid, we are way behind the queue”.

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Babenko at Vyriy Drone recalls receiving a phone call from a Chinese factory, in which he was told he could now buy any number of a type of motor that had previously been unavailable.

The reason, he was told, was that the Russians had opted to buy an entire production line instead of components. They no longer needed the motors that had been allocated to them.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also stated that Chinese firms operate in Russia. “There are production lines on Russian territory where there are Chinese representatives.”

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Other western officials say the Chinese state appeared to be directly helping Chinese sellers and a Russian buyer evade western sanctions and China’s export controls.

“We understand that a Chinese state-linked company was assisting a Russian defence company with circumventing Chinese government export controls, by using a central Asian country as a proxy end-user,” say the officials.

They did not disclose the identity of the state-linked company or the central Asian country. US Treasury sanctions from January refer to Kyrgyzstan-based Keremet Bank as the operator of the regional financial clearing platform. Keremet did not respond to a request for comment.

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