The Monster Behind Russias Global Effort to Evade Western Sanctions

The cover story was simple.The Trading Company of the Kyrgyz Republic, an official government entity, was paying $1 million for a bulk shipment of car floor mats, auto body polish, safety glasses and rope.In reality, the money was for the kind of drone parts that have helped power Russia’s war machine.The scheme from early last year was one of thousands of instances of sanctions evasion orchestrated by A7, a Moscow-based financial services firm whose internal documents were leaked online by hackers late last year.Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has been largely locked out of the global financial system.The country’s financial institutions are blocked from using the dollar, and most international banks have stopped processing payments for Russian companies.

That was intended to make buying both consumer and military goods abroad incredibly difficult.But A7 has found a reliable way to sidestep restrictions, conducting an ever-expanding network of shell companies to launder funds and orchestrate international payments on behalf of Russian businesses, the documents show.Along with those documents, a New York Times analysis of internal software used to falsify transactions, interviews with current and former employees, and databases of business transactions and other previously unreported records offers the first detailed blueprint of Moscow’s rampant circumvention of the financial firewall built by the West.The company helps Russian businesses send money abroad, often through shell companies that it has established in Asia, Africa and elsewhere and that have little purpose other than to mask the purchases of goods....