Gary Somerville

Gary Sommerville, an open-source intelligence investigator with the UK's Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), authored a recent report that found 450 foreign-made components were being used in Russia's most sophisticated weapons. He said Russia had adapted to the sanctions and built a successful covert procurement system centered in its neighbors and other nearby states, including Kazakhstan. "Despite the initial sanctions and export control measures that were put in place just after the invasion of Ukraine, they have adapted and they're relying on these on these third countries," he told Insider. "It's a problem we've never faced before, at least not on this scale," he said.

The continuing access to specialized rifle cartridges made in the West, such as the .338 Lapua Magnum, by a sanctioned Russian small arms manufacturer like Orsis maker Promtekhnologiya is “egregious,” said Gary Somerville, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British defense think tank. “At present, there is only one manufacturer of this cartridge in Russia,” he added. “Preventing the shipment of these types of ammunition from Western countries to Russia is an easy win for those seeking to constrain Russia’s ability to wage war in Ukraine.”

Most of the weapons rely highly on Western-made microelectronic technologies, according to report co-author Gary Somerville, a research fellow at RUSI’s Open-Source Intelligence and Analysis Research Group. “It doesn’t appear that they actually have the ability to reproduce – at least to the same level of sophistication and at scale – a lot of these critical microelectronics. These are the ones that would be absolutely essential for, for example precision-guided munitions which have very sophisticated processing units,” Somerville told VOA.