How a Russian arms maker targets unknowing Canadian companies to get around sanctions

A Russian defence contractor sought to acquire electronics from two Canadian companies in a broader plan to skirt international sanctions and make weapons for the war in Ukraine, according to a leaked intelligence cache provided to CBC News.

Activist hackers who call themselves the Cyber Resistance and are linked to secretive sections of the Ukrainian government, exfiltrated data from the email account of an employee at St. Petersburg-based arms company Special Technology Center (STC), a supplier of unmanned aerial vehicles and weapons to the Russian war effort in Ukraine.

The cache contains internal STC documents, company emails, contracts worth millions of rubles and target lists of electronics made in the U.S., United Kingdom, China, Canada, Switzerland and Sweden, among others, that are needed to make their armaments.

According to a senior officer in the Ukrainian military with direct knowledge of the hacked materials, the hackers provided them with the information from STC.

«It has a huge value because we understand the Russians still produce high technological equipment,» he said. CBC News has agreed to withhold his identity to prevent against threats from Russia.

At the outset of the full-scale invasion in 2022, Canada and its allies immediately imposed extensive sanctions against the Russian military industrial complex, including STC, making blanket bans on the export of microelectronics to Russia.

But the cache provides insights into how Russian arms makers source those technologies, normally unassociated with the business of war, from unknowing Western companies.

STC did not respond to a request for comment from CBC News about its pursuit of sanctioned technologies in Canada and abroad.

Russian supply lists