On the menu today: A deep dive into what is inside a Russian Kinzhal hypersonic missile; the surprising number of electronic components that U.S. companies made; the various explanations for how those components ended up inside those missiles; why you should root against the Memphis Grizzlies NBA team; and the question of whether the U.S. government allocates enough resources to prevent sensitive technology from ending up in the hands of our enemies. Read on.
Tracing the Tech
Until February 24, 2022, it was generally legal for a U.S. manufacturer of microelectronics, telecommunications items, sensors, navigation equipment, avionics, marine equipment, and aircraft components to send them to customers in Russia or to customers who were likely to sell them or pass them along to Russia.
Let’s keep in mind, no one in their right mind considered the Russian military a bunch of good guys before February 2022. They annexed Crimea back in 2014 and started their “little green men” hybrid attacks that year. And as with all autocratic regimes, if you ship something to anyone in Russia, and the regime in Moscow wants it, the regime in Moscow is going to get it.
The Kh-47M2 Kinzhal, or “Dagger” is a big Russian missile — 23 feet long with a wingspan of five feet. It can reach a speed of Mach 10, has a more than 1,000-pound conventional explosive warhead, and the hypersonic version of this weapon costs $10 million to produce. The U.S. Army has concluded the Kinzhal is “designed to target U.S. and NATO warships posing a threat to strategic missile systems in Russia’s European region. It has the additional task of destroying NATO missile defense systems, ballistic missile defense ships, and land objects close to Russia’s borders.”
The precise number of Kinzhals launched at Ukraine during the invasion is not clear, but we have some numbers. As of January 2024, Russia had launched 63 Kinzhal hypersonic air-launched missiles at Ukrainian targets and an additional 50 between January and October 2025.
The Ukrainian military spends a lot of time looking at Russian drones, bombs, missiles, crashed planes, etc., taking them apart and figuring out where all the parts come from, and figuring out where Russia is getting the components. A 23-foot-long hypersonic missile has a lot of chips and electronics inside, and the Ukrainians have identified a whole lot of parts . . . and a bunch of them were made by American companies.
There are four ways that American-made or American-labeled parts can end up in the hands of the Russians without the U.S. manufacturers doing anything wrong. One is that the chips were sold before the ban on sensitive technology transfers went into effect in February 2022.
Another is that the parts found by the Ukrainians are counterfeit; this is a longstanding problem in military procurement, even for the Pentagon, and the shortage of semiconductor chips means that there’s a booming black market in pulling old chips from scrapped circuit boards, cleaning them up, and re-marking them as new with some premium brand on it.
A third is that the parts are stolen or fraudulently obtained. In November 2022, the U.S. Treasury Department enacted sanctions on the Russian company Milandr, accusing it of running “an illicit global microelectronics procurement network.” Separately, in 2024, U.S. authorities arrested Artur Petrov, a Russian national, on charges that he fraudulently procured from U.S. distributors large quantities of microelectronics subject to U.S. export controls using a shell company in Cyprus. Petrov was arrested . . . and then traded to Russia in 2025 as part of a prisoner swap. Here in the U.S., theft of semiconductor chips is booming, and it’s not just in this country. Just this week, a half-million dollars’ worth of Nvidia chips disappeared at the São Paulo airport in Brazil.
The last, a variation of the third, is transshipment — the U.S. manufacturer sells the semiconductor chips to a legitimate buyer not on any sanctions list, and that buyer then later sells them to the Russians.
Crack open a Kinzhal missile, and you know what you’ll find, according to a detailed analysis by the Ukrainian military?
- A transceiver made by Texas Instruments, as well as a “buck converter” made by the same company.
- A “differential ADC driver” made by Analog Devices headquartered in Wilmington, Mass. Sometimes the Ukrainians can determine the production date of a piece of equipment; this one was allegedly produced in May 2022. There’s also an RS-232 interface driver produced in December 2025.
- A memory chip produced in May 2021, manufactured by Micron Technology, based in Manassas, VA.
- A configuration device manufactured by Altera, based in San Jose, Calif.
- A gigabit Ethernet transformer manufactured by Halo Electronics, based in Santa Clara, Calif.
- A transformer manufactured by Holt Integrated Circuits, Inc., based in Aliso Viejo, Calif.
- An Ethernet transceiver manufactured by Cortina Systems, which was based in Sunnyvale, Calif., until it was purchased by Inphi Corporation.
- A CMOS optocoupler manufactured by Broadcom Corporation, based in Palo Alto, Calif.
- A valve matrix manufactured by Xilinx, a San Jose-based company that was acquired by Santa Clara-based AMD back in February 2022.
The list of U.S.-manufactured components goes on for pages and pages, with photos of each component found and identified. The Ukrainians have also found components inside a Kinzhal missile manufactured by companies based in Great Britain, China, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, and Japan.
The good news is that there are some signs that Russia is having a harder time getting its hands on the parts needed to build this particular kind of destructive missile; mass production has been suspended since April 2026, and Ukrainian intelligence estimates that Russia has about 50 Kinzhals left. This is believed to be a factor in North Korean missile units deploying to the Russian front in August of this year.
But as you’ve likely seen in the news coverage, the lack of Kinzhals isn’t really slowing the overall bombardment of Ukrainian cities and civilians, and our government has chosen to not transfer protective Patriot missiles to the Ukrainians:
At least some of the transfers of Patriot interceptor missiles are from countries friendly to Ukraine that require Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to approve the handoff, according to a U.S. official and three additional people familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic exchanges. The United States retains control because the weapons are made by it and are shipped abroad under the agreement that transfers to other countries require U.S. sign-off.
Then there’s the separate question of why so many Russian soldiers are using radio bridge antennae manufactured by Ubiquiti, a publicly traded San Jose-based tech giant. From a January 2026 report from Hunterbrook, an investigative news outlet:
Ubiquiti radio bridge antennae serve a critical communications need for the Russian military in Ukraine, including for drone operations, according to our investigation. A Ukrainian communications officer estimated 80 percent of Russian radio bridges they’d observed on the battlefield were made by Ubiquiti. “Ubiquiti is made for regular people — basically plug-and-play. Tons of tutorials on YouTube,” the officer explained. “There is no alternative,” a Russian vendor told Hunterbrook. The U.N. has called Russia’s drone attacks against civilians crimes against humanity.
Hunterbrook identified at least nine Russian military units accused of war crimes, or individuals associated with those units, that use Ubiquiti equipment in Ukraine, based on a review of Telegram posts and open-source materials. One fundraising group that said it had donated Ubiquiti antennae to Russian forces is run by a terrorist convicted of the 2015 bombing of a Ukrainian government building.
Hunterbrook tested how easily export-banned Ubiquiti equipment could reach Russian forces. Posing as a Russian military procurement officer, a reporter contacted Russian vendors and multiple official Ubiquiti distributors worldwide. Nearly a dozen agreed to sell export-banned equipment. . . .
The company is facing a human rights lawsuit from Ukrainian civilians and family members of civilians killed or injured in Russian drone and drone-assisted attacks.
Ready for something odd? Here’s the press release page for Ubiquiti. There is no statement, rebuttal, or response to the Hunterbrook report. It’s been about nine months. I would be happy to share Ubiquiti’s side of the story, but so far, they haven’t put out their side of the story. And when a big U.S. company gets accused of facilitating war crimes and doesn’t put out any response . . . you start to wonder if there is another side of the story.
The founder of Ubiquiti is Robert Pera, the owner of the Memphis Grizzlies NBA team. The NBA season begins today; karma would have the Grizzlies finish 0–82 this year.
Enforcement of export controls on semiconductors is principally the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security. A report from Reuters in July 2024 suggested that the U.S. was making progress in slowing the flow of chips to Russia:
Transshipments of Common High Priority Items (CHPL) — advanced components like microelectronics identified by the U.S. and EU as likely to be used in Russia’s war in Ukraine — through Hong Kong dropped by 28 percent between January and May, according to a U.S. Commerce Department official. During the same period, transshipments through mainland China, excluding Hong Kong, fell by 19 percent.
. . . But six months later, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee completed a 15-month review and concluded, “Enforcement of export controls is a shadow of what it should be, and inadequate at every level. BIS is asked to fulfill a key national security function on a shoestring budget, forcing it to trace increasingly sophisticated distribution networks while relying on laughable technology that has not been meaningfully updated for nearly two decades.”
We can debate what qualifies as a “shoestring budget,” but in fiscal 2025, the BIS spent $208 million. In 2013, the agency’s budget was $150 million, which, once you adjust for inflation, comes out to $216 million in today’s dollars.
ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post, a look at the president’s increasingly frequent public raging at Fox News Channel and why he’s encouraging his Truth Social followers to watch “Right Side Broadcasting Network” instead.