China’s Secret Lifeline to Russia’s Killer Drone Producer

New Documents obtained by POLITICO rovide the Clearest Evidence Yet of a Chinese State Firm supplying the Kremlin’s Military Industrial Complex

GRAHAM LANKTREE,
PHELIM KINE and SOPHIA YAN
in London 

 

 

A Chinese state-owned firm has supplied Russia with the materials required to build hundreds of kamikaze drones, according to internal Russian company shipping documents obtained by POLITICO.

The records, which have been reviewed by Western governments, provide the clearest evidence yet of a Chinese-state corporation continuing to aid a sanctioned company in the Kremlin’s military industrial complex.

The shipping and customs documents reveal the Chinese firm disguised the shipment of 46 tons of carbon-fiber chemicals to a subsidiary of Russia’s Rosatom earlier this year. The corporation develops the key components of the kamikaze drones Moscow used to attack a shopping mall in central Ukraine in August, killing at least 16 people. 

Chinese components have long been retrieved from Russian drones following strikes on Ukraine. Yet the documents gathered from Russian sources by the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre — a Kyiv-based think tank close to the Ukrainian government — detail for the first time how a Chinese state firm exported crucial drone-making components directly to Russia.

The USCC has shared the documents with the U.K. and U.S. governments. 

These revelations “would allow the [U.S.] State Department to sanction” the Chinese supplier, because they “establish” shipments to Rosatom’s subsidiary after it was sanctioned by much of the West, said David Albright, founder and president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security think tank. The shipment, he points out, is disguised with a customs code for exports like nylon and polyester. 

 

 

 “Rosatom and its enterprises operate in full compliance with applicable laws and regulatory requirements,” said a spokesperson for the Russian state firm. “Any claim to the contrary is false and demonstrates a lack of understanding of how Russia’s customs authorities operate.”

Chinese state firm Jilin Chemical Fiber Group did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Both the State Department and the U.S. Treasury Department can impose sanctions “to disrupt the networks and channels through which Russia procures technology and equipment from abroad to support its war effort,” the State Department said in a statement last year. 

“This evidence provides irrefutable proof that Chinese state-owned companies are involved in the supply chains of raw materials to Russia,” said Serhii Kuzan, head of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre. International sanctions on Russia mean that “China has become arguably the main, and in fact the only, source of supply for the materials needed to manufacture the composites used in Russian weaponry,” Kuzan said. 

The U.S. House Select Committee on China has reviewed the documents and determined they are “legitimate,” according to a U.S. government official familiar with their contents. The Ukrainian government has also reviewed the documents and confirmed their authenticity, a Ukrainian official said. Both officials were granted anonymity as they were not authorized to speak on the record. 

 

 

 The Treasury Department declined to comment on the specific allegations of Chinese shipments of materials essential to Russia’s weaponized drone program, but said in a statement it takes “allegations of sanctionable conduct extremely seriously.” 

The State Department didn’t respond to a request for comment. Britain’s Foreign Office has reviewed the documents and did not push back on the revelations. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment.

Chinese President Xi Jinping told Russia’s Vladimir Putin in a meeting in late August that ties between the two nations are set to strengthen.

From the outset of its war on Ukraine, Moscow has signaled Beijing’s support is essential to its ability to resist foreign pressure to end the conflict. 

“In essence, we have built a stable system of mutual trade that is protected from external influence,” Putin said in May. Beijing’s cooperation with Moscow has blunted the impact of foreign sanctions aimed at starving Russia’s military industries of key components. 

Xi-Trump summit 

The revelations come as U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to meet Xi in Washington later this month.

New evidence of China’s support for Russia’s war on Ukraine may intensify pressure on Trump from pro-Ukraine lawmakers to push Xi to stop such shipments in a meeting that both leaders would likely prefer to devote to extending the fragile truce in the U.S.-China trade war. 

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. 

 

 

 In August, Putin appointed a general to head up drone warfare in a newly established branch of Russia’s military to strike deep inside Ukraine. Ukraine is meanwhile intensifying attacks on Russian oil refineries, threatening the foundation of the country’s economy. 

During a trip to Moscow last month, CIA Director John Ratcliffe warned Russian officials not to escalate the conflict in Ukraine with America’s NATO allies amid suspected Russian-linked sabotage and drone incursions across Europe. Moscow has made a series of recent threats against countries that support Kyiv. 

The Chinese government has consistently denied providing weapons to support Russia’s war on Ukraine. “We would not add fuel to the fire, and above all we would not profiteer” from the conflict, Chinese leader Xi said in 2023. Washington has repeatedly accused Beijing of providing dual-use items — materials usable in both civilian and defense manufacturing — that go directly to the Russian military. 

The scale of the shipments and the military importance of the Russian company receiving them, however, suggest Chinese officials are either turning a blind eye to that assistance or are actively facilitating it, said multiple U.S. weapons experts, former intelligence officials and diplomats. 

Evidence of Chinese support for Russia’s weaponized drone program “smear and scapegoat China,” Beijing’s embassy in Washington said in a statement.  “We have never provided lethal weapons to any party to the conflict, and strictly control dual-use items,” the embassy said.

The Russian embassy in Washington didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Former U.S. officials familiar with Chinese government oversight of state-owned companies dismiss those claims. 

“They are doing it knowing that the Chinese government will not bust them for it,” said Dennis Wilder, former CIA deputy assistant director for East Asia and the Pacific. “The idea that Chinese state-owned enterprises can hide things from the Chinese government just doesn’t wash.” 

The shipment “could not have escaped Chinese government attention,” said Washington-based weapons expert Albright. He and his organization, the Institute for Science and International Security, have conducted years of in-depth research on Russia’s drone production. 

What the docs show 

The Russian-language documents establish the shipment of the carbon-fiber chemical between the warehouse addresses of Chinese state-owned Jilin Chemical Fiber Group and Alabuga-Volokno — a subsidiary of Russian state firm Rosatom’s advanced materials and composites division UMATEX. 

The firm is based in a factory complex in Russia’s Tatarstan region. There, in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, Alabuga-Volokno supplies high-spec carbon-fiber to Moscow’s mass production of the long-range kamikaze drones, built on the design of Iran’s Shahed, USCC and Albright’s research shows.

Alabuga-Volokno and UMATEX have faced a variety of Western sanctions since 2023, including sanctions imposed by the U.K. and under a White House executive order.

Its operations are also sanctioned by Ukraine, the EU, New Zealand and Switzerland. The U.S. government prohibits exports that can be used by the Russian military. 

Jilin, a large Chinese state-owned enterprise specializing in the production and sale of synthetic chemical fibers, doesn’t currently face Western sanctions. 

Disguised with a customs code for civilian synthetic fiber exports, the shipping documents dated 2026 and marked with the Rosatom Alabuga-Volokno logo, set out “a full range of freight forwarding services, including cargo transportation, customs clearance, and cargo insurance” between the companies for two 40-foot shipping containers filled with a maximum total of 46 tons “of polyacrylonitrile tow (PAN-precursor) for manufacturing purposes,” according to a translation. 

 

 

 So called PAN-precursor fibers are the key chemical component to make military-grade, light weight carbon fiber. The correct customs code would have identified the shipment as a dual-use item that has both military and civilian applications, said Albright.

The mislabeling of customs codes “points to a company hiding a more sensitive order,” said Kerri Bitsoff, a former Treasury official who designed and enforced sanctions against Russian weapons procurement networks. 

“The company takes a controlled item, finds a plausible cover code, and ships it under that category,” she said. “The same cover will often be used across different companies for similar items.”

None of the sanctioned Alabuga SEZ companies imported goods using the customs code normally used for PAN-fiber, according to a review of 2022-2025 trade data from Sayari, a risk and data intelligence company.

Metadata scraped from the shipping document shows the document was created by a Russian state official serving the Tatarstan region.

Alabuga-Volokno’s key role is providing Russian strategic industries with high-spec structural carbon fiber, with 89 percent of the company’s production expected to go to defense industry enterprises by 2030, according to the USCC’s calculations. Internal company product lists shared by the USCC think tank with POLITICO show Alabuga-Volokno makes 39 items containing carbon fiber with various types of polymer binders for aviation, rocket engineering, drones, shipbuilding and armor.

The Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre says it has tracked at least eight tenders to contract shipments of PAN precursors in containers to Alabuga-Volokno from Jilin Chemical Fiber Group since 2022 up to this year.

Sanctions violations 

The Ukrainian government believes the shipping documents show potential sanctions evasion, the Ukrainian official said. A British government official said “it would not be appropriate to speculate about any potential future sanctions designations as to do so could reduce their impact.” 

Jilin is providing “a critical part of making the carbon fiber necessary” to make weaponized drones, Albright said. “Without it, you can’t build the airframe,” he explained, noting it’s used to strengthen the wing and internal structures, including the fuel tank and engine. The amount of PAN shipped from Jilin would be enough to produce carbon-fiber for as many as 1,300 kamikaze drones, he estimated. 

Albright, who has long studied kamikaze drone-making in the Alabuga SEZ factory complex, says Russia has been “totally dependent on China” to supply the specialized PAN acrylic fiber that is the primary ingredient used to manufacture high-performance carbon fiber. 

“Dual-use goods from China and Hong Kong keep Russia’s weapons programs running despite Western export controls,” the U.S. House Select Committee on China said in an August report. Beijing provides more than 60 percent of components necessary to keep Russia’s military functioning, per data published in June by the Kiel Institute, a German nonprofit economic analysis foundation.

“The number of companies in China that have provided dual-use capabilities to Russia’s military industrial complex is in the dozens now, and those connections are deep,” said Kurt Campbell, former deputy secretary of state in the Biden administration. In exchange, he added, Moscow provides Beijing technology transfers to upgrade “some military capabilities that they have sought.” 

With China’s support, the Russian defense industry “is able to continue to grow its manufacturing base for a wide range of drones, components for missiles, and other types of weaponry, which are then used in its attacks on Ukraine,” said USCC’s Kuzan, noting that ongoing shipments only deepen the industrial sector integration two of the West’s strategic rivals. 

“Combating these channels through secondary sanctions, export controls, and enforcement of sanctions restrictions, financial pressure on intermediaries, and coordination with Asian partners,”  he said, “must be a priority for the defense and economic policies of the U.S., the EU and their allies.” 

John Sakellariadis contributed to this report.

Sophia Yan is a reporter for The Telegraph, a publication owned by Axel Springer, POLITICO’s parent company.

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, The Telegraph, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.