Russian company imported 370 million rubles worth of Ukrainian aircraft parts since January 2022, new investigation finds

Between January 2022 and July 2023, a Russian company called Avia FED Service imported at least 650 million rubles ($7.35 million) worth of airplane and helicopter parts, according to the investigative outlet iStories. Of that amount, 370 million rubles ($4.17 million) were spent on products from Ukrainian companies.

Additionally, Avia FED Service imported aircraft parts from companies in France, the U.S., and the U.K. According to public procurement data, the firm’s top customers were the Russian Defense Ministry, subsidiaries of the state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec, and the Rossiya Special Flight Squadron.

iStories’s investigation found that because Avia FED Service came under Ukrainian sanctions in 2018, subsequent imports used a UAE company called Linker as an intermediary. More recent deliveries have been made through a Kyrgyzstani company called Bakaytorg1. Since the latter firm’s registration in April 2023, it’s sold nearly 40 million rubles ($450,800) worth of parts from the FED Machine-Building Plant in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region to Avia FED Service.

At the same time, Alexander Reshetnik, the director of Avia FED Service, told iStories that the Ukrainian products his company received in 2022–2023 were acquired in 2020–2021 and were simply being “stored abroad” until their shipment to Russia. He didn’t respond to a follow-up question about how this could be possible given that Bakaytorg1 didn’t exist until 2023.

Linker owner Alexey Palchik told iStories that the UAE company “doesn’t supply and never has supplied anything” from Ukraine to Russia.