China secretly supplied Russia with components for killer drones
Investigation reveals link between projectiles used by Moscow in attacks on Ukraine and carbon fibre materials exported by Beijing.
A Chinese state-owned company supplied Russia with materials to build hundreds of kamikaze drones.
The parts were sent to a firm linked to Russia’s largest energy producer, which builds the Geran drones used to attack a shopping mall in central Ukraine in August, killing at least 16 people.
The disguised transfer of the components is detailed in internal Russian documents, reviewed by The Telegraph in a joint investigation with Politico.
The documents show for the first time how a Chinese government firm exported crucial drone-making components directly to Russia.
The revelations pose major questions for Russia, China and the Trump administration.
Donald Trump’s peace envoys arrived in Kyiv on Sunday after thanking Vladimir Putin for “incredible memories” in a Moscow meeting on Saturday.
Mr Trump is due to host Xi Jinping later this month following threats to tighten sanctions on China.
Washington has repeatedly accused Beijing of providing dual-use items – materials usable in both civilian and defence 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 were either turning a blind eye to that assistance or were actively facilitating it, said multiple US weapons experts, former intelligence officials and diplomats.
The shipping and customs documents reveal the Chinese firm disguised the shipment of 46 tons of carbon fibre chemicals to a subsidiary of Russia’s Rosatom earlier this year.
The records, which have been reviewed by Western governments, provide the clearest evidence yet of a Chinese-state corporation aiding a sanctioned company in the Kremlin’s military-industrial complex.
The corporation that received the Chinese components develops the key components of the kamikaze drones.
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 (USCC) – 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 UK and US governments.
These revelations “would allow the [US] 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 pointed out, was disguised with a customs code for exports such as nylon and polyester.
“Rosatom and its enterprises operate in full compliance with applicable laws and regulatory requirements,” said a spokesman 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 US 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 USCC. 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”, Mr Kuzan said.
The US House select committee on China has reviewed the documents and determined they are “legitimate”, according to a US 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 authorised to speak on the record.
The treasury department declined to comment on the specific allegations of Chinese shipments of materials essential to Russia’s weaponised drone programme, but said in a statement it took “allegations of sanctionable conduct extremely seriously”.
The state department did not respond to a request for comment. Britain’s Foreign Office has reviewed the documents and has not pushed back on the revelations. The CIA declined to comment.
Mr Xi, the Chinese president, told Russia’s Putin in a meeting in late August that ties between the two nations were set to strengthen.
From the outset of its war on Ukraine, Moscow has signalled 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 co-operation with Moscow has blunted the impact of foreign sanctions aimed at starving Russia’s military industries of key components.
Xi-Trump summit
Mr Trump is preparing to meet Mr Xi in Washington later this month.
New evidence of China’s support for Russia’s war on Ukraine may intensify pressure on Mr Trump from pro-Ukraine legislators to push Mr Xi to stop such shipments in a meeting that both leaders would probably prefer to devote to extending the fragile truce in the US-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. Meanwhile, Ukraine is intensifying attacks on Russian oil refineries, threatening the foundation of the country’s economy.
During a trip to Moscow last month, John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, warned Russian officials not to escalate the conflict in Ukraine with the US’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, Mr Xi said in 2023.
Evidence of Chinese support for Russia’s weaponised drone programme “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.
Former US officials familiar with Chinese government oversight of state-owned companies dismissed 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 Mr Albright, who is a Washington-based weapons expert. He and his organisation, the Institute for Science and International Security, have conducted years of in-depth research on Russia’s drone production.
The Russian embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
What the documents show
The Russian-language documents establish the shipment of the carbon fibre 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 (SEZ), Alabuga-Volokno supplies high-spec carbon fibre for Moscow’s mass production of the long-range kamikaze drones, built on the design of Iran’s Shahed drones, research by USCC and Mr Albright shows.
Alabuga-Volokno and Umatex have faced a variety of Western sanctions since 2023, including sanctions imposed by the UK and under a White House executive order.
Its operations are also sanctioned by Ukraine, the EU, New Zealand and Switzerland. The US government prohibits exports that can be used by the Russian military.
Jilin, which specialises in the production and sale of synthetic chemical fibres, does not currently face Western sanctions.
Disguised with a customs code for civilian synthetic fibre 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 40ft 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 fibres are the key chemical component to make military-grade, light-weight carbon fibre. The correct customs code would have identified the shipment as a dual-use item that has both military and civilian applications, said Mr Albright.
The mislabelling 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 fibre, with 89 per cent of the company’s production expected to go to defence 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 fibre with various types of polymer binders for aviation, rocket engineering, drones, shipbuilding and armour.
The USCC 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.
Sanctions violations
The Ukrainian government believed the shipping documents showed 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 was providing “a critical part of making the carbon fibre necessary” to make weaponised drones, Mr Albright said. “Without it, you can’t build the airframe,” he explained, noting it is 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 fibre for as many as 1,300 kamikaze drones, he estimated.
Mr Albright, who has long studied kamikaze drone-making in the Alabuga SEZ factory complex, said Russia had been “totally dependent on China” to supply the specialised PAN acrylic fibre that is the primary ingredient used to manufacture high-performance carbon fibre.
“Dual-use goods from China and Hong Kong keep Russia’s weapons programmes running despite Western export controls,” the US House Select Committee on China said in an August report. Beijing provides more than 60 per cent of components necessary to keep Russia’s military functioning, according to data published in June by the Kiel Institute, a German non-profit 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 provided Beijing technology transfers to upgrade “some military capabilities that they have sought”.
With China’s support, the Russian defence 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 Mr Kuzan, noting that ongoing shipments only deepened the industrial sector integration of two of the West’s strategic rivals.
He added: “Combating these channels through secondary sanctions, export controls, and enforcement of sanctions restrictions, financial pressure on intermediaries, and co-ordination with Asian partners must be a priority for the defence and economic policies of the US, the EU and their allies”.