The FBI and US Department of Commerce have launched a probe into claims of American-made computer chips being found in Russian military hardware in Ukraine, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
Government agents have been visiting companies and asking about how their chips and other components ended up in Russian radars, drones, tanks, ground-control and other weapon systems, “people familiar with the matter” told the paper.
“Our goal is to actually try to track that back, all the way back to the US supplier” and figure out “how did it find its way into that weapons system,” one Commerce Department official said.
“Just because a chip, a company’s chip, is found in a weapon system doesn’t mean we’ve opened up an investigation on that company. What we’ve done, though, is we’ve opened up an investigation on how that company’s chip got into that system,” the unnamed official explained.