BBC investigation: a Kyrgyz company with a fashionable model sent British military optics to Russia

This is a translation of material from our colleagues from the BBC Research Department. You can read the original version in English This.

Customs documents obtained by the BBC show that the British company’s high-tech equipment, worth $2.1 million (£1.6 million), was sold to Russian companies linked to the military.

According to the documents, the British-made camera lenses were sent by a company registered in Kyrgyzstan, which appears to be run by a swimsuit model.

The British manufacturer, Beck Optronic Solutions, which was involved in work on the British Challenger 2 tanks and F35 fighter jets, told us that it did not violate sanctions, did not deal with Russia or Kyrgyzstan and did not he was aware of these deliveries.

Our research raises questions about the effectiveness of sanctions imposed on Russia since the start of the war in Ukraine.

As a result of an investigation by the BBC, Valeria Baygaskina, a 25-year-old from Kazakhstan who now lives in Belarus. The girl, who works from time to time as a model, leads a social life and regularly reports about it on social networks. In the last two years, she has visited Dubai, Sri Lanka and Malaysia.

Baigaskina’s social networks do not say that she is at the same time the director of a company that supplied equipment worth millions of dollars to Russian companies subject to sanctions. This was shown by our analysis of customs documents.

According to Belarusian records, Baigaskina was the founder and director of a company called Rama Group LLC, registered in February 2023 at an address in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan – 3,700 km from her residence in Belarus.

Both countries are former Soviet republics with close trade links with Russia. Belarus remains Moscow’s most loyal ally in Europe.

Since sanctions against Russia were introduced in February 2022, UK exports to Kyrgyzstan have increased by more than 300%, according to trade data. Experts suspect that some of the goods are actually going to be in Moscow.

Customs documents obtained by the BBC show that Rama Group has twice supplied Russia with high-tech optics that can be used in missiles, tanks and aircraft.

The customs declaration states that the equipment was manufactured by Beck Optronic Solutions in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire. The company manufactures high precision lenses used in target identification and surveillance systems.

While some of his designs are used in healthcare and mechanical engineering, the Beck Optronic website details extensive military and defense applications.

Lenses and optical technologies sold by Beck Optronics are listed as goods that cannot be legally exported to Russia or require permission from the British authorities to sell.

According to customs documents, the BBC found six shipments of products manufactured by Beck Optronics, with a total value of $2.1 million (£1.6 million), which entered Moscow through Rama Group and another intermediary company, LLC “Shisan”.

In December 2023 and January 2024, Rama Group made two deliveries to Moscow, indicating “rotating parts of the camera” in the declaration. The recipient was the Sol Group based in Smolensk, which was previously subject to US sanctions.

It is not clear which international route the goods took – documents indicate that some of the goods may have been sent to Thailand.

Another four deliveries of Beck Optronics products worth $1.5 million (£1.1 million) were made by another Kyrgyz company, Shisan LLC.

Two of these included a “short-wave infrared camera lens” and were sent to the Ural Optical-Mechanical Plant, which makes bomb guidance equipment and is also under sanctions for its links to Russian military.

Rama Group and Shisan are registered at the same address in Bishkek – in a new five-story building in a prosperous area of ​​the city. However, when we arrived at this address, we were told that Valeria Baygaskina was on a business trip outside the country.

We found her number through social media posts and shared our search results with her.

Baygaskina said she founded the company, but sold it in May this year. Claiming that “nothing like this was given” when she owned the company, she hung up.

She later told us via email that the allegations were “ridiculous” and based on “false information”.

Our research showed that she sold Rama Group in May this year to her best friend Angelina Zhurenko, who owns a company that sells clothes in Kazakhstan.

Zhurenko told us: “Trading activity is carried out only within the framework of the current legislation of Kyrgyzstan. The company does not violate any restrictions. Any other information is incorrect.”

The director of another intermediary company, Shisan, is listed as Evgeniy Anatolyevich Matveev. We reported the results of our investigation to him via email.

He called our information false and said he was involved in “supplying only civilian goods produced in Asian countries.”

“This is not against the laws of the state in which I work and has nothing to do with the US sanctions, because it is impossible to prevent the free trade of goods Asian available for sale and delivery,” he said.

There is no evidence that Beck Optronics knew about these shipments or that the final destination of the lenses was Russia.

The company told us it had nothing to do with these supplies: “Beck Optronics did not supply anything that contravened UK export restrictions or any UK sanctions. The Company had no dealings with any parties or companies in Russia, Kyrgyzstan or Thailand, had no knowledge that any cargo could go to any of these destinations, and sent nothing to the those destinations.”

The company believes that some of the equipment was made somewhere else, and that customs documents could be justified.

But these exports are part of a much larger scheme involving supplies from a variety of sources.

An analysis of customs documents by Washington-based security think tank C4ADS shows that Shisan made 373 shipments from Kyrgyzstan to Russia from July to December 2023.

Of these, 288 were goods that were under the customs codes of “high priority items for battle use.”

In the same six months, Rama Group made a total of 1,756 deliveries to Russia. Of these, 1,355 were items on the “high priority items for use on the battlefield” list.

The latest deliveries, including electronic components from American and British companies, were made for the Russian company Titan-Micro, which has been under US sanctions since May 2023 for its work in the Russian military-industrial complex.

“When they sell this technology to a potential Russian end user, they have to understand that this is being done to kill people,” says Elena Tregub of NAKO, an independent anti-terrorism group corruption in Ukraine.

She warns that loopholes in the sanctions system cost lives.

“Without these technologies, these weapons would not fly. The control part of these ballistic missiles, these kamikaze drones, is made using Western technologies,” she says.

The world knows about Kyrgyzstan’s role in avoiding sanctions imposed against Russia.

In April, the British Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, visited Bishkek and called on the Kyrgyz authorities to adhere strictly to sanctions.

The President of Kyrgyzstan expressed confidence that Lord Cameron’s official visit to his country will “bring new impetus to multilateral cooperation between Kyrgyzstan and the UK.”

David O’Sullivan, the EU’s special envoy for sanctions compliance, told the BBC that work to crack down on “illegal supply networks” was ongoing and that companies had “a duty to do due diligence to understand who the end users are and where they are. the end.” “Items for combat operations.”