German and Czech companies are still supplying materials to the Russian military industry, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said and called for these companies to be punished with sanctions, Agence France-Presse reported, BTA reported.
"The Russian Federation receives machine tools from some countries, which they use to produce weapons", the Ukrainian president said on Friday during a briefing, the information from which was under embargo until today.
According to him, 15 of these companies are Taiwanese, 13 are German, 8 are Czech, 6 are South Korean, 3 are Japanese and 3 are Indian.
"One company also supplies a small number of components coming from the United States“, he added and said that he has the names of these companies, without mentioning them, however. at the briefing.
"We have given the names of all these information to everyone, to our partners, to the EU and the United States. We strongly urge everyone to sanction these companies“, Zelensky said.
According to him, the companies in question can disconnect these metal-cutting machines, which work with electronic systems with remote activation, and make them unusable. This, according to him, would be tantamount to disarming Russia without using weapons for this purpose.
Zelensky said that he had sent 26 countries information about the companies in question.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia has been subject to severe Western sanctions, aimed in particular at cutting off supplies of equipment and technologies used by the Russian military industry. But Moscow has managed to partially circumvent these sanctions by organizing imports through third countries or through allies, notes Agence France-Presse.