About 80% of the components Russia uses for weapons production come through China, posing the biggest challenge to the EU’s sanctions policy.
This was stated by David O’Sullivan, the EU Special Envoy for Sanctions Implementation related to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, during the “Fair Play: Honest Game” conference on additional sanctions against Russia held Friday in Kyiv, reports Ukrinform.
“About 80% of these goods enter Russia via China or Hong Kong and China. It’s a very difficult conversation. When President von der Leyen, or President Costa speak about this at summits, or our member states, President Macron, Chancellor Scholz when he was in Beijing — the Chinese usually respond: ‘We don’t understand what you mean. We don’t supply anything with military use for Russia.’ So we keep pressing, but the response is lukewarm. You see this in many products made in China. These are Chinese copies of Western brands,” explained O’Sullivan.
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He added that similar difficult negotiations happen in Malaysia, Southeast Asia, Thailand, and Singapore, where he plans to go again next month, as many local companies are subsidiaries of European firms.
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According to the special envoy, companies have introduced clauses banning resale to Russia and conduct client checks, but at some point their components disappear into a “wild field,” making supply chain control impossible.
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“I try to explain to manufacturers in third countries that these components — especially a list of 50 joint priority categories we prepared closely with Ukrainians — may seem harmless. These include optical readers, integrated circuits, microchips, flash memory cards, which are found in our phones and computers. But when they get to Russia, it becomes weapons of war,” O’Sullivan detailed.
Yeah, good luck with blocking those items. They’re used in way more than weapons. Probably even in medical equipment and such. Not to mention how many manufacturers there are and how many distributors there are. This isn’t the late-stage capitalist consolidated landscape of the EU or NA where very few firms are responsible for all these widgets. And that’s before you even broach the substantiated unwillingness of Global South countries to go against a country they have had a more reliable relationship with, devoid of colonialism, classic or neoliberal. All the while they see that the Europeans and Americans have fucked Ukraine by being an unreliable partner, from leaky financial sanctions, through chronically insufficient weapons supply, to taking huge parts of their resources in exchange.