US aircraft parts worth $14.4 million were shipped to Russia over the past eight months — The New York Times

Among them, $8.9 million worth of parts manufactured or trademarked by the American aircraft manufacturer Boeing and sold to Russia via third parties. The New York Times reported this.

According to Russian customs data obtained by the newspaper despite the sanctions, "thousands of shipments" of aircraft parts were successfully sent to Russia in 2022.

The data collected and analysed by the Import Genius aggregator shows that tens of millions of dollars of aircraft parts were shipped to sanctioned Russian airlines. Among them are Rossiya Airlines, Aeroflot, Ural Airlines, S7 Airlines, UTair Aviation, and Pobeda Airlines.

According to The New York Times, these shipments were made possible by illicit networks that emerged to circumvent the restrictions by shuffling goods through a series of straw buyers, often in the Middle East and Asia.

The majority of the product was routed through the United Arab Emirates, Türkiye, China, and the Maldives. But a handful of shipments came directly from the United States or Europe.

Despite the level of sanctions evasion, aircraft deliveries to Russia remain significantly lower than before the full-scale war. 

According to The Observatory of Economic Complexity, a data visualisation platform, Russian imports of aircraft and aircraft parts fell from $3.45 billion to $286 million.