Two years after start of Ukraine war, Russian titanium keeps flowing to West

[Celerity]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/21/russia-titanium-exports-sanctions/

https://archive.is/Xlo9b

A vehicle moves a red-hot ingot of titanium alloy before pressing at the VSMPO-AVISMA plant in Verkhnyaya Salda, Russia, in 2018. (Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Western firms bought hundreds of millions of dollars of titanium metal from a Russian company with deep ties to the country’s defense industry after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, according to a review of Russian export data. The purchases illustrate how the West remains dependent on Russia for certain products despite pledges to break economic ties with Moscow. In the case of titanium, that dependence raises security concerns, industry and defense analysts say, as the metal is vital in the manufacturing of both commercial and military airplanes.

“Russia could shut off the flow of these … materials and leave companies critical to national defense and civil aviation scrambling,” said William George, director of research at ImportGenius, the company that supplied the trade data gathered from an official Russian database to The Washington Post. After more than two years of war in Ukraine, Russia continues to export oil and gas that eventually reaches the United States and its allies, and Russian firms are still able to sell everything from diamonds to uranium because the West wants the goods and allows carve-outs from sanctions.

The titanium firm, VSMPO-AVISMA, has not been placed under sanctions by the United States or the European Union despite being partly owned by Rostec, a defense conglomerate that owns hundreds of companies and is under U.S. and European sanctions. Rostec is led by an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Sergey Chemezov, who has been personally sanctioned since the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Roughly 15,000 tons of titanium worth $370 million were exported by VSMPO in 2022, the vast majority of it sent to Western nations that supported Ukraine, according to the export database, with Germany, France, the United States and Britain topping the list. VSMPO, which essentially is a monopoly in Russia, then exported at least $345 million in titanium in 2023, according to more-limited data for that year seen by The Post. Russian trade data was difficult to acquire in 2023, with the available data lacking most of the details that showed transactions with Western firms. George said ImportGenius could not comment on why certain details were no longer in the data.

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