In the fall of 2024, Spanish authorities announced that they had uncovered a supply chain of sanctioned chemicals to Russia, including compounds that could be used to produce chemical weapons and nerve agent poisons.
The export of such chemicals from the European Union to Russia would certainly raise alarm bells, given the Russian security services' links to nerve agent attacks on Kremlin opponents, including the recently deceased opposition leader, Alexei Navalny.
Authorities in Madrid have not released details about the specific chemicals in the 13 tons they seized, nor the types of chemical weapons they could have helped produce.
However, an investigation by Radio Free Europe revealed that the seized cargo included a compound that plays a key role in Russia's war machine.
Radio Free Europe's Russian service analyzed videos of the seizure released by Spanish authorities and found that the inventory of the contents of the seized barrels has widespread use in the Russian military industry, including in the production of drones, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and batteries for nuclear submarines.
The compound in question is a powerful chemical solvent called N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone, abbreviated as NMP, and the same abbreviation was spotted on the labels of some of the barrels shown in the Spanish police videos.
NMP - widely used in the oil and pharmaceutical industries - has been placed on the European Union's list of goods banned from sale to Russia.
Brussels made the move in April 2022, six weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Global consumption of NMP has also increased due to its use in the production of lithium-ion batteries and microcircuits.
Labels on the barrels shown in the Spanish police videos also indicate that the seized NMP was manufactured by a Chinese chemical company, and the container number shows that the shipment arrived in Barcelona three months after leaving the Chinese port of Qingdao in June, according to an analysis of shipping records conducted by Radio Free Europe's Russian Service.
Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Chinese-made NMP has been purchased by a company of the sanctioned Russian state conglomerate Rostec, which is a supplier to Russia's Kurchatov Institute, a sanctioned nuclear weapons manufacturer that also develops drones.
It is not clear whether the goods shown in the video are the only shipment seized by Spanish police and customs officers in their two-year investigation into illicit trade in dual-use goods.
Spanish authorities have not released the names of the individuals or companies suspected in this case, and local police did not respond to a request from Radio Free Europe about what substance or compounds were seized in the October raid at the port of Barcelona.
'Critical' chemical
Russia does not produce its own NMP, which is why it is dependent on imports of this compound, which is included in the list of critical products for the country's chemical industry.
Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there were instances of the Russian military-industrial complex purchasing Western-produced NMP.
For example, Russian procurement records show that in 2018, the sanctioned Russian company Uralelement purchased 1,5 tons of German NMP from another Russian firm, Uraltekhimport.
Uralelement, which describes itself as a "strategic enterprise of the military-industrial complex," is part of the Russian state-owned defense conglomerate Tactical Missile Corporation, which has also been under Western sanctions since 2022.
In July 2021, Deputy Defense Minister Alexei Krivoruchko visited the Uralelement plant. A message on the company's website said that Krivoruchko "signed important decisions regarding the production of special-purpose batteries manufactured by Uralelement for military unit 40056."
Open records show that military unit 40056 is part of what is now the Main Directorate for Deep-Sea Exploration (GUGI). Under the auspices of GUGI, a secret surveillance submarine, informally known as Losharik, suffered a catastrophic accident in 2019 while conducting tests in the Barents Sea.
The accident was later blamed on a short circuit in the battery compartment.
Another customer of the NMP before the Russian invasion of Ukraine was the Arzamas research and production company Temp-Avia, also part of the Tactical Missile Corporation, which produces electronics for Russian military aircraft and drones with missile systems, government procurement data shows.
In the spring of 2023, the director of Temp-Avia stated that the "production load in connection with" the Russian war against Ukraine "has increased many times over."
Another customer of NMP was the Central Design and Technological Bureau of Polymeric Materials with Trial Production, which supplied materials to the Votkinsk Plant, the manufacturer of the Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missiles.
About half of the 29 publicly available state procurements of NMP before 2022, reviewed by Radio Free Europe's Russian Service, are from state-owned companies linked to the military-industrial complex.
Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Chinese-made NMP has also been purchased by the Petrov Institute of Plastics, a subsidiary of Rostec.
Corporate data shows that one of the key customers is the All-Russian Institute of Aviation Materials (VIAM) at the Kurchatov Institute, headed by a close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Kovalchuk.
A senior scientist at VIAM spoke at a roundtable last year about "the development of state-owned unmanned aerial vehicles for special purposes, taking into account air defense systems", and also spoke about "experiences in the development of materials and additive technologies for the production of unmanned aerial vehicle systems".
Shipment tracking
The Russian service of Radio Free Europe, analyzing the labels on the barrels shown in the Spanish police videos, identified the manufacturer of the seized NMP as the Chinese company BYN Electronic Material, whose product range also includes this solvent.
The video also shows the container number, YMLU3377990, which indicates that the owner is Chinese shipping company YangMing Marine Transport Corp.
The company's website reveals the route of the seized shipment: it left the Chinese port of Qingdao on June 19 and arrived in Singapore on July 10.
On July 28, she left for Barcelona, where she arrived on September 21 – three weeks before Spanish police announced the seizure.
Data analyzed by Radio Free Europe's Russian Service shows that NMP, produced by the Chinese company BYN, was purchased by the Russian company Aventel RUS in 2023.
Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Aventel RUS attempted to become a supplier of NMP to the Sverdlov plant, a Russian explosives manufacturer under US sanctions, but was unsuccessful.
'Operation Test Tube'
The Spanish investigation, conducted with the help of the European Anti-Fraud Office, began in 2022 under the codename "Operation Probirka", which is the Russian word for "test tube".
Spanish police said they had focused on a Spanish company "managed by citizens of Russian origin" that had developed a complex network to deliver "illegal chemical products to Russia."
The Spanish firm had a company in Moscow that was the ultimate recipient of the chemicals, although their final destination was hidden through shell companies in third countries, including Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, which served as intermediaries, Spanish police claim.
They said the shipments were diverted to Russia by land to these fictitious recipients, a scheme used to route sanctioned dual-use electronics to Russia through Central Asia, bypassing efforts by the United States and the European Union to block global supply chains for the Russian military.
Spanish police, who announced the raid in October and said they were investigating the case, did not respond to a request for comment on the current state of the investigation.
Bonus video:
