More and more loopholes are being found in the wall of sanctions built by the West to isolate russia from any opportunity to get weapons and continue its war in Ukraine. Here and there military products leak into the russian federation which raises doubts about whether the already undertaken measures are enough.
While dual-use electronics casually sold on the open market is no news at this point, the recently uncovered evidence of russian military units procuring small arms ammunition is something definitely noteworthy.
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Mercenaries of the russian paramilitary Wagner Group company were seen using .338 Lapua Magnum ammunition, to be specific. According to Politico, those ammos could get into russia through black market. A russian company named Promtekhnologiya which specializes in making Orsis T-5000 sniper guns has included in its import declaration 102,200 lead bullets made by US-based Hornady. The total amount of "hunting cartridges" filed in a series of such declarations is 460,000.
The Hornady .338 Lapua ELD Match cartridges with a bullet weighing 285 gr (18.5 grams) are positioned by the manufacturer as match bullets. Worth noting, match ammunition provides better consistency, they are made by precision manufacturing machines with minimal size tolerance and is intended for shooting sports and hunting.
These ammos are neither specifically for military use nor special sniper bullets but their quality is high enough to provide sufficient precision at large firing distances; for the Orsis T-5000, this distance is 1,000 to 1,500 meters.
The batches of ammunition did not come from the United States directly, as Hornady CEO said himself as he assured his company had not supplied "any russian son-of-a-b*tch" with its products. After all, a direct export threatens huge fines and other unpleasant consequences to quite a well-known arms maker, up to a USD 1 million penalty and 20 years of imprisonment.
Another russian importer of these cartridges is the Tetis enterprise. Overall, Politico found that searching for and buying this type of American ammunition requires no significant effort. On the part of Defense Express, we add that in fact any decent russian arms shop offers almost any kind of ammunition on order. Although they appear pricey – RUB 2,500 to 3,000 ($30-35) per cartridge. In Ukraine, for instance, the same ammunition can be found at $8-12 per cartridge.
But the most interesting here, anyway, is how exactly US-made ammos get to the russia market which was thoroughly investigated by the journalists. They tracked a black market batch coming from the Valerian shop in Slovenia, this enterprise is figured as the seller and maker of ammunition for the russian Promtekhnologiya. The owner shop of the Slovenian company with a paid-in capital of €7,500 denied any involvement saying he had no clue why Valerian was mentioned in the russian documents, especially as a "manufacturer" of the said ammunition.
Journalists also contacted the Slovenian government and received confirmation that the company did not sell cartridges to russia but did ship ammunition in disassembled state to Kyrgyzstan. The country's government also said it initiated an investigation and will thwart any attempts by russia to circumvent sanctions.
As a reminder, the European Union is currently discussing another package of sanctions aimed against any countries that help russia evade sanctions. At the same time, we should be realistic about the fact it is impossible to cut off all the shadow routes of weapons flowing into russia. Nonetheless, we can only imagine the scale of the tragedy that could take place if there were no sanctions against the Kremlin at all.
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