US firms supply three quarters of the electronics in Russia's new jet drone

Engineers with Ukraine's 1230th Athena Engineering and Technical Regiment opened the wreckage of Russia's new Geran-4 jet drone and identified 105 electronic components on its onboard computer. At least 80 of them — 76 percent — were made by American companies. Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor, which Texas Instruments acquired in 2011, account for 61 components between them.

The parts are ordinary industrial fare: TMS320F28335PGFA processors for data processing and control of onboard systems, VP230 CAN transceivers for data exchange between modules, PS767D301 voltage regulators and REF3020 reference voltage sources for stable measurement circuits. The investigation, published by the Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi, calculates that at a production rate of 3,000 drones a month, the dependence works out to more than two million Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor components a year.

A separate teardown by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a news organization funded by the US government, reached the same result: the drone's brain is powered by Texas Instruments chips, with much of the remaining foreign-made content traced to China. Russia relies heavily on foreign technology to power the new one-way attack drone despite severe sanctions from Western governments. The Geran-4 is turbojet-powered, faster and harder to intercept than its predecessors and capable of operating deep inside Ukraine.

How the components reach Russia is unknown. Militarnyi lists the possibilities as stockpiles from before the sanctions, purchases through third-country intermediaries or shell companies, or a combination of the two. Countries of origin were assigned by the parent company's place of registration, which makes the American share a floor rather than a ceiling — an Intersil part counts as Japanese, under Renesas, not American. The outlet's conclusion is that no effective mechanism exists for monitoring compliance with sanctions, neither at the level of the companies themselves nor at the government level.

The markings and serial numbers were legible because most of the drone's internal components survived the impact intact.