US charges Virginia firm over suspected illegal tech exports bound for Russia via Finland

The defendants shipped items to “purported end users” in Turkey, Finland and Kazakhstan, “knowing that the items were ultimately destined for end users in Russia”, according to the US Justice Department.

The United States Department of Justice has charged a US-based firm and two of its senior executives with illegally exporting millions of dollars of technology to Russia, alleging that some of the exports were sent through Finland.

The company in question is Eleview International which is based in the US state of Virginia. The two executives implicated in the case are Oleg Nayandin and Vitaliy Borisenko.

“As alleged, the defendants — a Virginia company and two of its senior executives — conspired through three evasion schemes to circumvent the export restrictions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said in a press release.

According to the Justice Department, the defendants started shipping items to “purported end users” in Turkey, Finland and Kazakhstan, “knowing that the items were ultimately destined for end users in Russia”.

“In the Finland scheme, the defendants exported about 3.45 million US dollars (3.15 million euros) worth of goods purchased to Russia through Eleview’s e-commerce website to a false end user in Finland that neither purchased nor sold goods,” the justice department’s press release stated.

“Before consolidating the packages into larger pallets for shipment to Finland, the defendants affixed to each package a label with a Russian postal service tracking number so that the Russian postal service could easily ship the package to the customer in Russia,” the department’s release continued.

“The goods that the defendants illegally exported as part of the Finland scheme included ‘high priority’ items that the [US] Department of Commerce has identified as particularly significant to Russian weaponry, including the same type of electronic component found on Russian ‘suicide’ drones used to destroy Ukrainian tanks and jets.”

If the defendants are found guilty, they could face up to 20 years in prison, according to the US authority.

Finnish Customs did not offer a comment to news agency STT about whether Finland had investigated the case.