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Russia is ramping up Shahed drone production using European-made components.
Investigations

Investigation: How Russian drones exploit European technologies to strike Ukraine, and beyond

by Alisa Yurchenko

Editor's note: This story is part of a cross-border investigative project that involved eight newsrooms, initiated by De Tijd (Belgium) and coordinated by the Kyiv Independent and OCCRP. Other stories published within the project are linked at the bottom of this investigation. A tiny Austrian sensor designed for precise motion control made an impressive journey across the globe. Some time after being sold to a company in Hong Kong, it turned up in Ukraine inside a long-range military drone laun

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Exclusive: We discovered what's going on inside Russia's shadow fleet

The vessels are old, their hulls streaked with rust, and their ownership obscured behind layers of shell companies. Yet the tankers that make up Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, the armada used to move sanctioned oil across the globe, are kept running with modern Western technology including Starlink, an investigation by the Kyiv Independent can reveal. To gain an insight into how the shadow fleet operates, the Kyiv Independent spoke to two Ukrainian sailors who claim they unwittingly became p

part of Russia's "shadow fleet," anchored off the coast of Ahtopol, Bulgaria, on Dec. 8, 2025.

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