Grandstand. We must take stock of the importance of export control measures in the European response to the invasion of Ukraine. In a few days, the G7 countries and the European Union (EU) succeeded in setting up a control regime whose restriction capacities are unprecedented since the end of the cold war, serving a clear objective: to weaken the Russian military-industrial complex as much as possible.
As early as 2014, the European Union had adopted a control regime for exports to Russia of dual-use goods in response to its “destabilizing actions in Ukraine”. European regulations prohibited member states from exporting these goods to Russian military entities.
But this regime allowed deviations. In 2020, Germany exported 366 million euros of dual-use goods to Russia, its fourth customer. In theory, export licenses were issued because the end users were civilians. However, these products were found in military systems, such as the Orlan-10 drones, used by the Russian army for reconnaissance operations in the Donbass, in support of its artillery.
The new control regime, born of the invasion of Ukraine, corrects these defects. It eliminates any distinction between civilian and military users and retains only the nature of the property transferred as a criterion. This extreme measure aims to prevent the use of false certificates and the harmful role that civil intermediaries can play in the service of the Russian arms industry.
Extraordinary advances
Above all, the new European regime goes further than the 2014 regulation: it is no longer based on existing multilateral lists of military equipment or dual-use goods. These are the result of laborious negotiations within the Wassenaar Arrangement, the multilateral export control regime for conventional arms and dual-use goods and technologies created in 1996… and which includes Russia.
The new regime thus covers the “advanced technology”, a new category thus created by the EU and which fairly broadly includes electronics, computing, telecommunications, sensors, lasers, shipbuilding, avionics or satellite navigation. The criterion: their interest in Russia’s military-industrial complex, or the inherent dual-use potential of the technology. In other words, what is usable by the army is no longer transferable.
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