EU says up to 70% of hi-tech imports ‘killing Ukrainians’ are reaching Russian military via China
- Brussels sanctions chief David O’Sullivan says the bloc is ‘actively engaged’ in talks with Beijing about how to stop Moscow getting such products
- O’Sullivan says many of the products in question are ‘normally innocent’ but are being used in weapons found on the battlefield in Ukraine
Speaking at an event in Brussels on Wednesday, O’Sullivan said he was “actively engaged” with China in a “conversation that will be challenging”.
“Now we need to understand better exactly what that means. How much of this is actually produced by China, copying our technology, how much of it is produced in China but with Western technology, and how much is coming directly from other sources and then re-exported via China,” said O’Sullivan, who was named as the EU’s first special envoy for the implementation of sanctions in January.
“These products are killing Ukrainians, and if they go to Russia, you may consider them normally innocent. But once they go to Russia, we know they’re not going into consumer goods or innocent activities. They will go straight to the military industrial complex and produce weapons that are more lethal and more deadly.”
The products referred to are part of a new field of dual-use goods that have both civilian and military purposes.