Customs declarations are not written for spies or analysts, which is what makes them useful to both. Somewhere in Russia’s trade records, between August 2015 and April 2023, sit 12 shipments from the Rubin Central Design Bureau, the St Petersburg firm behind Russia’s Kilo-class and ballistic-missile submarines, to Chinese military buyers. Together they were worth more than $80m. That is the central finding of a new report from C4ADS, a Washington-based research group, and it is the most specific public evidence yet that Russian and Chinese submarine designers have been working together.
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