The Secret Spy Network Feeding Russia’s War Machine

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**Rachel Abrams** (0:31)
From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams and this is The Daily.
For years now, Russia has been the target of Western sanctions designed to keep it from building advanced weapons. And yet, it's continued to batter Ukraine with high-tech missiles and drone attacks. But how it's managed to do that has largely remained a mystery until now. Today, our colleague Jane Bradley explains what she's uncovered about the network of spies keeping the Kremlin's war machine running. It's Friday, August 14th. Jane Bradley, welcome to The Daily.

**Jane Bradley** (1:26)
Thanks for having me.

**Rachel Abrams** (1:27)
So Jane, I remember at the beginning of Russia's war with Ukraine, there were all of these stories that basically made it seem like Russia was not equipped to wage a modern war, right? Like they were rolling out these sort of mothballed Cold War era tanks, for example. And yet here we are all these years later and we're watching Russia continually hit Ukraine with these really sophisticated weapons.
So I guess my first question to you is, how have the Russians seemingly advanced so much from where they at least appeared to be when the war started?

**Jane Bradley** (2:01)
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, in the early days of the war, the old school equipment, the tanks you described, things like that, worked because it was largely an old school war.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:11)
Trench warfare between Ukrainian fighters and Russian forces closes 15 feet apart.

**Jane Bradley** (2:17)
So think soldiers with guns in trenches and bunkers.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:21)
The soldiers fire a rocket-propelled grenade.

**Jane Bradley** (2:24)
Often they were separated by just a few hundred meters.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:28)
But now there's a problem. A Russian drone is overhead.

**Jane Bradley** (2:33)
But over the last couple of years, the war in Ukraine has gone really high tech.

**SPEAKER_6** (2:38)
This is what a kamikaze drone attack sounds like.

**SPEAKER_7** (2:42)
Reports of waves of explosive-laden drones striking Kiev and setting residential buildings there on fire.

**SPEAKER_6** (2:51)
Ukraine firing the first American-made long-range missiles into Russia.

**Jane Bradley** (2:55)
It shifted from artillery battles to drone warfare and ballistic missiles.
This is where Russia has a problem, because it doesn't make this type of technology, that it needs to build these kinds of high-tech weapons. And we're talking about things like semiconductors and microchips that act as the brain of drones and ballistic missiles and help direct them to their targets. And in the early days of the war, Western countries, allies of Ukraine, imposed these sweeping trade restrictions, these sanctions designed to keep exactly this type of technology out of Russian hands.

**Rachel Abrams** (3:38)
And yet obviously those sanctions have not worked, right? Because just in the past few months, we have seen Russia strike Kiev, it struck other cities and towns inside Ukraine. There have been these incredibly devastating consequences. Hundreds of civilians have died this year.

**Jane Bradley** (3:50)
Exactly. It hasn't worked. So Ukraine has been investigating and trying to figure out, how is Russia getting its hands on the technology, the parts it's supposed to be cut off from.

**Rachel Abrams** (4:03)
How does one even go about trying to trace the component parts of a missile or a drone and where they came from?

**Jane Bradley** (4:10)
So every time there's a major attack in Ukraine, investigators from Ukraine's military intelligence service, Comfu, they dig through recovered components from these weapons, these drones, these missiles.

**Rachel Abrams** (4:25)
They're actually digging them out of the ground?

**Jane Bradley** (4:26)
Yes. Wow.

**Rachel Abrams** (4:27)
Okay.

**Jane Bradley** (4:28)
Yes. Literally combing through, digging it with their own hands. And they're trying to find microchips and other weapons components.
And in 2024, these Ukrainian investigators started to notice something. A lot of these weapons components that they were finding were actually coming from Japan. And this was really surprising. Japan's been a close ally, a really vocal supporter of Ukraine. It was one of the first countries to issue sanctions against Russia. On the very first day, it invaded Ukraine. And this really shocked and concerned the Ukrainian officials that I spoke to. And actually, when I first received a bunch of documents from Ukrainian sources, which included lists of this equipment, pictures of this equipment, I was actually speaking to my source and asked, can you give me an idea of how many of being found on the battlefield in Ukraine? And he corrected me. He was like, this is not the battlefield. All of these parts are being found in civilian attacks.