Our latest investigation: how Taiwan became one of Russia’s most important suppliers of high-precision metalworking machines. Some of the machine tools were even acquired by nuclear research institutes and missile developers in Russia. 🧵
While most of the machine tool manufacturing countries from the West, such as Germany, ceased the exports to Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, Taiwan kept the business going and even saw significant increase in machine tool exports to Russia in 2022.
This is of course concerning for the US, especially considering that TW is a de-facto ally of the West and has sided with Ukraine since the war began. TW is also among the few countries that are capable of producing advanced machine tools, with quality only inferior to 🇩🇪🇨🇭🇯🇵