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free. A month to go behind the paywall, to see what Times subscribers get every single day. If you don't already subscribe to the New York Times, download the Times app today, and get free access for 30 days. From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. For years now, Russia's been the target of Western sanctions designed to keep it
from building advanced weapons. And yet, it's continued to batter Ukraine, with high-tech missiles and drone attacks. But how it's managed to do that has largely remained a mystery until now. Today, our colleague Jane Bradley explains what she's uncovered about the network of spies, keeping the Kremlin's warm machine running. It's Friday, August 14th.
Jane Bradley, welcome to The Daily. Thanks for having me. So Jane, I remember at the beginning of Russia's war with Ukraine. There were all of these stories that
“basically made it seem like Russia was not equipped to wage a modern war, right?”
Like they were rolling out these sort of mothballed Cold War era tanks, for example. And yet, here we are, all these years later, and we're watching Russia continually hit Ukraine with these really sophisticated weapons. So I guess my
first question to you is, how have the Russians seemingly advanced so much from
where they at least appeared to be when the war started? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, in the added days at the war, the old school equipment that tanks she described, things like that, worked because it was largely an old school war. Trench warfare between Ukrainian fighters and Russian forces as close as 15 feet apart. So tank soldiers with guns and trenches and bunkers. The soldiers fire a
rocket propelled grenade. Often they were separated by, you know, just a few hundred
“meters. But now there's a problem. A Russian drone is overhead. But over the last”
couple of years, the war in Ukraine has gone really high tech. This is what a kamikaze drone attack sounds like. The reports of waves of explosive laden drone striking, keep and setting residential buildings there on fire.
Ukraine firing the first American-made long-range missiles into Russia. And it
shifted from artillery battles to drone warfare and ballistic missiles. And this is where Russia has a problem because it doesn't make this type of technology that it needs to build these kinds of high tech weapons. And we're talking about things like semiconductors and microchips that act as the brain of drones and ballistic missiles and help direct them to their targets. And in
the early days of the war, Western countries, allies of Ukraine, impose these sweeping trade restrictions, he sanctions, designed to keep exactly this type of technology out of Russian hands. And yet obviously those actions have not worked, right? Because just in the past few months, we have seen Russia strike cave, it struck other cities and towns inside Ukraine. There have been these
incredibly devastating consequences. Hundreds of civilians have died this year. Exactly. It hasn't worked. So Ukraine has been investigating and trying to figure out how is Russia getting its hands on the technology the parts it's supposed to be cut off from. How does one even go about trying to trace the component parts of a missile or a drone and where they came from? So every time
there's a major attack in Ukraine, investigators from Ukraine's military intelligence service, comb food they dig through, recovered components from these weapons, these drones, these missiles. They're actually digging them out of the ground. Yes. Okay, well, okay. Yes, literally combing through, digging it with their own hands. And they're trying to find microchips and other weapons
components. And in 2024, these Ukrainian investigators started to notice something. A lot of these weapons components that they were finding were actually coming from Japan. And this was really surprising. Japan's been a close ally, a really vocal supporter of Ukraine. It was one of the first countries to issue sanctions against Russia on the very first day. It invaded
Ukraine.
spoke to. And actually when I first received a bunch of documents from Ukrainian
sources, which included, you know, lists of this equipment, pictures of this equipment, I was actually speaking to my source and asked, can you give me idea of how many of being found on the battlefield in Ukraine? And he corrected me, he was like, this is not the battlefield. All of these parts are being found in civilian attacks. And in May, earlier this year, when these Ukrainian
investigators were crawling through the debris of this awful attack on a residential building in Kiev that had killed 24 people, including children, they found Japanese components inside a missile that had destroyed the building. Well, and the Ukrainian government estimates that 90% of Russian weapons
drones, missiles contained Japanese components. So Japan is a critical supplier
of the Russian War Machine. Okay, so clearly for the Ukrainians, the question is, if Japan has these sanctions, how are its parts nonetheless ending up in Russian
“weapons that are being used to attack its cities and its civilians?”
Exactly. That's a question that Ukrainian investigators had. That's a question we had when we first started reporting this story out. Obviously, Japanese companies are banned from trading with Russia. So the question is, how are they getting around these export rules? How is Russia getting its hands on these Japanese parts if it's not through legal routes? How do you even begin to answer a question like that?
So my colleagues and I, Michael Schwartz and Adam Goldman, started this investigation last year after we got a tip from an intelligence source. And that tip eventually led to our conversations with five different Western intelligence agencies. And what we found out is that the Russian Intelligence Service, the military service, the GRU,
actually has a specialised spy unit that's entirely dedicated to evading Western sanctions and smuggling the parts the technology that Russian needs for its war machine. That unit is called the 20th Directorate.
And one of the big breakthroughs we got in our reporting was finally being able to identify
the spy, the Russian spy leading its operations in Japan, a guy
“by the name of Maxim Phil Chenkov. Wow, so you are uncovering not just this secret”
massive spy operation, the name of it, but you've actually gotten the name of one of the spies. What do you know about him at this point? So at this point, we know that he's a veteran GRU officer. He's fluent in Japanese Russian and English. Wow. And he began his second tour of Japan back in 2024 when he was posted there on paper as an employee of Eriflott, the Russian state airline. So the cover for the spy to be clear is
airline executive? Yes, exactly. And what's interesting about that is in intelligent circles for years, Eriflott has been known to be a cover for Russian spies, basically. Well, also being a legitimate airline, like the thing is like a cover for spy, but also flies people commercial? Yeah, exactly. So who knows who you could be sat next to? Oh, yeah, and it's worth noting that Eriflott is entirely state-owned. So Russian intelligence
services have for years looked for state-owned entities that they basically control where they can plant spies today, like Phil Chenkov. And what did you learn about what Phil Chenkov was doing under the cover of Eriflott? So we spoke to our Western intelligence sources to try and figure that out. And what they told us is that he was sent to Tokyo to basically develop relationships with a network of logistics companies,
importers, that could be useful for them in smuggling these weapon parts to Russia.
“And what are these companies doing for Phil Chenkov exactly? Like can you just explain that?”
Yeah, so Phil Chenkov needs these companies to do a few things for him. The first thing is to actually buy the components that he needs. Because of sanctions, Japanese companies are not allowed to sell these components to Russia or Russian companies right now. And so Phil Chenkov needs a middleman company to basically buy this equipment for him. And then once he has the equipment these components, he needs help shipping it out of Japan to Russia.
Why can he just fly them though if he ostensibly worked for Eriflott? I mean that would be a lot easier for him. But the sanctions imposed on Eriflott by Japan and others means Eriflott is effectively grounded in Japan. So they can't actually fly in and out of the country.
So Phil Chenkov needs to find these logistics companies in Japan who will ess...
book passage for him on other airlines which are allowed to fly out of Japan. And because it's
“effectively illegal to fly this equipment directly to Russia, what these logistics companies will”
do is arrange transport from Japan to a third party country like Sri Lanka or Vietnam and then
Eriflott will charter one of their own planes from Vietnam or Sri Lanka say to get the goods from their to Russia. And so how is he identifying the kinds of companies that he can turn for Russian purposes? So Phil Chenkov is part of a much wider network in the 20th directorate. And he will have do you call the satin Moscow at a desk who are looking for companies in Japan and elsewhere which could make good targets for Phil Chenkov to try and identify and build up relationships with.
And they tend to target these kind of mid-sized logistics companies, smaller mid-sized,
“ones that don't attract much attention, which are registered in Japan, but they tend to have”
someone Russian in a senior position. How big is the universe of obscure Japanese companies run by Russians who are sympathetic to the Kremlin? You know what, way too big as I found out at this stage of the reporting. But what was helpful is that if you go on the Eriflott website, they list their official partners in every country. So we had the names of two logistics companies. And then when I looked through the corporate filings, I found that low and behold,
there was a senior Russian in each company or a Japanese business person with strong connections to Russia, which is kind of the wider profile they're looking at. So that gave us a really good lead. And then we took the names of those companies back to our intelligence sources and asked
them, "Are these companies worth digging into?" And they basically said yes. But just to go back
to the spy, Phil Chenkov for a second, if all of these places are involved in the supply chain,
“like Vietnam Sri Lanka, as you mentioned, is there a reason that he's in Japan specifically?”
Because again, Japan is a Western ally. He's in Japan for two reasons. One is that Japan makes the high-tech technology that Russian needs. And sure, China makes some of it, some of the microchips, etc. But Japan really specializes in particular machine tools, things that drill that cut, that they basically need to make these parts for Russian weapons. And the second thing is that Japan is known and has been for years as a spy paradise. So Japan,
Japan has, as a spy paradise, and it has this long history of that dating back to World War II, when it wants kind of fierce intelligence capabilities were dismantled by the wars winners,
the Americans, and it's never really recovered since. You know, it has no foreign intelligence
agency at all. In fact, it doesn't have any centralized intelligence agency. It's kind of split between these five, six different departments within different government agencies. So to answer your question, Japan has a technology that Russian needs and it's much easier for Russian spies to operate and base themselves from Japan. And it's not just full-chank off. Our sources told us that dozens of Russian spies fled to Japan as Europe and the West expelled hundreds as Russian invaded
Ukraine. They found a safe-haven in Japan. Okay, so clearly, very easy to be a spy in Japan is what you're telling us. So at this point, Jane, you have a name, full-chank off, you've identified some of the Japanese companies working with him. What do you do next? It's one thing to have a bunch of information from anonymous intelligence sources, but we needed to prove or at least cooperate what they told us ourselves. So the next thing we did was hunt for addresses, for full-chank off,
for the network of logistic companies who have been told us helping him and my aim was to try and speak with full-chank off and as many of those business owners as possible to try and find out what's going on. And so I booked my tickets to Tokyo in the hope that I could get some of them to talk to me. We'll be right back. I'm Daniel Adkinson. I'm a travel editor at The New York Times. When you're
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to The New York Times. Jane, at this point you were headed to Tokyo, you're on the trail of this Russian spy. What's the protocol for something like this? Can you just knock on his door like any other source? I'm not sure there is a protocol for trying to hunt down a TIE you officer for a
“time. I didn't know of them. Honestly, I had no idea what to expect. When I got there,”
Phil Chenkov was the first person on my list, obviously, to try and get to speak to me.
So I rocked up at the Arafloffis with my translator. Uh-huh. It's like a sparkling 22 story plus tower block by this old shrine. And we just walked in. We just walked in with this huge thing that's done by security. There was no security. There was no reception desk. I guess Tokyo is such a safe city that you can just walk straight into the lift, go up to the 22nd floor and the door's opened and I was taken by surprise because the Arafloffis door is literally right there. And I knocked
on the door and middle-aged woman with a Russian author, Docs Cross ran her neck and so the door. She looked really surprised to see me. So I just introduced myself with my name and asked if Mr.
“Phil Chenkov was in the office. She again saw looking quite surprised that he wasn't and that we would”
need to make an appointment. And over the next three days, we were in this kind of almost comedy-like can mouse chase with him. So every time we knocked. She would say, "Come back at this time, I would come back at that time." "He's not at the ground, although he wants to be off it." "Yes." She kept telling us he wasn't around and then it got to the day before my flight.
"I'm sorry to bother you, I have to play back tomorrow. I just want to see him in this film take off." I'd said, "Please can we speak to Mr. Phil Chenkov?" "I should have asked him."
And she says, "I'm sorry, Mr. Phil Chenkov never wants to speak for you."
"Oh, wow, rude." "Yes, rude." There was no pretence at that point. I've come back another time. And we never got in front of him despite as trying to contact him for three days in him having our numbers and clearly knew who we were. But we then set off on the trail of trying to track down business associates who had met him and did know what he was doing at aeroflocked. And how did that go? So one of the people we knew that Phil Chenkov worked with was a guy
called Takahiko Miki. And he was that owner of a company called Proko Air, which is this logistics company which helps organize cargo getting from A to B. And we tracked him down to this high rise in Tokyo's industrial port neighbourhood. And his wife answered the door and they eventually invited us in. And when you walk in, you see these model planes. There was an aeroflock plane. There was a certificate to Proko Air for its excellent service to aeroflocked. And we followed him
into his own office. It's kind of dim windowless room. And he's really not what you would imagine someone accused of helping a Russian spy, because a sanctioned goods to Russia would look like. He's got this real earnest manner. And sources had described him to me as this kind of teddy bear like figure. And that is how he comes across. He seemed like he really wanted to help and he answered all my questions. And he really just was very insistent that yes he works with aeroflock, yes he
works with Phil Chenkov. But no, he does not ship any sanction goods to Russia and that he would never
do that. So what are you telling you the shipping of his being so open about the weather, the
Ship stuff?
And there are exemptions allowed for medical equipment sanctioned carveouts. So he said this was all
“above board. There is no way he would ship sanction goods or his business would shut down. And honestly”
like I don't think I'm gullible or naive, but he did come across as very earnest. And almost convincing in that I could imagine him being a bit negligent and not carrying out the checks that you diligence checks he should have done. How is that possible though exactly? Like you said that
maybe he's not doing his due diligence, but like how would he not know what he's shipping basically?
Yeah, I mean that's a very good question. And I guess every partner's sanctions, Russian sanctions for years. And one of the defenses I would often hear is that, oh we didn't know Russia was the final destination, right? We thought this was just good to Vietnam or Sri Lanka. And then the other defenses that, oh, I just took the paperwork at face value and I didn't know these were actually sanction goods and the paperwork was all bogus. And one of the defenses he relied on was just like,
I'm just booking cargo space, right? On these planes, I'm not the manufacturer, I'm not the supplier. And I played a little dumb and asked him if he could show me an example of an invoice. And he then gestures to his wife to fetch the nearest invoice from the top of a pile in the office. He brings it back to me. And before he gives it to me, he attempts to redact identifying information. So who's shipping it? But what do you mean redact? Like he's just striking things out with a pen?
Yeah, exactly. He just got a black marker pen and crossed out the details. He did it want me to see. And I left that interview with that piece of paper in my hand. And when I got back to the hotel and held up to the light, the redactions did it work. You could completely see who, who they're receiver, who he was shipping this equipment to. Oh my god. Honestly, it was one of those reporting
breakthrough moments that is really exciting. What did you see where was he shipping it to?
Once he held it up to the light? Yeah, so I could see that the company he was supplying that he was shipping to was a Russian pharmaceutical company called Artham. And it's founder had actually been sanctioned by the UK, by Canada, by Australia, for his extensive ties to Vladimir Putin. Wait, look at is that mean that when you were in his office, he was lying to you when he said, oh, I don't know
“what's in it. And what do I do know? It's all illegal in a bookboard. That's what the evidence suggests.”
Okay. And when I got back from Tokyo, we actually spoke to two people who told us that Mr. Meeky had specifically asked for help shipping prohibited items that he acknowledged were banned from being exported to Russia. Okay, so maybe not just a guy who was negligent with his paperwork. Right, exactly. I want to go back to how this whole reporting journey started because if you are able to piece this together, the Western intelligence sources that tipped you off
presumably they knew all of this already, right? Why did they tipped you off in the first place?
Like, what did they need from you? They tipped us off in the first place because they were both baffled and frustrated about Japan's lack of response. So let's be clear, both Ukrainian officials and foreign governments had warned Japan that this was happening, that Russian intelligence officers were operating in Tokyo and procuring this Japanese technology and that this Japanese technology was repeatedly being found on the battlefield in Ukraine and being used in civilian attacks.
Where Ukraine is basically telling Japan everything that Ukraine thinks it needs to know to take some kind of action. Exactly. They think they could take action to co-off the supply of Japanese parts to Russia if there was the political will to do so. So I spoke to a Ukraine official who said that in the early days of the war, they were finding a lot of parts from Germany in Russian weapons up to 20% actually in the early days and they warned the Germans and Germany
almost immediately cut off the supply of German components to Russia and Japan has it in the same. So that's one example that they pointed to say if the political will is there, they can choke the supply chain but Japan has not done that. But as you point out, Japan does not have the
“intelligence apparatus that Germany does, right? And that's what made them as you have explained”
this spy paradise for lack of a better term. So where does Japan stand in this sort of bigger problem of not having that intelligence operation that they might need to counter all of this?
Yeah, I think the first thing to say is that Japan acknowledges it has a prob...
espionage right now today. And actually when I sat down and talked with a senior lawmaker in Japan's government and asked about what they knew about the spies operating in Japan, he said that look, we have a sense of crisis about the situation. We don't have an exact number on the spies operating in Japan in Tokyo but we know there are a lot. And more broadly, Prime Minister Takahichi is really trying to build up Japan's intelligence capabilities. She's trying to build
under this new legislation that's being passed to Japan's first centralized intelligence agency.
But if it succeeds, if Japan succeeds, this is going to be a long-term project and not something
“that's going to happen overnight. How does this get solved then? Like where does that leave everything?”
Well in the days after we published our investigation, we heard from sources that the Japanese government had begun investigating. Phil Chenkov and Mr. Meeky of Prokoa and were kind of looking into what was going on here. And we got some news recently that Phil Chenkov, the geospy, has actually fled Japan, the day after we published our story. Oh wow. Yeah, so it seems like putting the spotlight on him and this wider problem Japan has, has had the effect that our sources wanted it to in that
Phil Chenkov has been bent, his identity is now out there. And Japan seems to have been embarrassed into some kind of action, though we need to spend a bit more time watching it to see how substantive
that is. Basically, this guy's cover was blown, so we can't really act like a spiny more.
He flees. I wonder, Jane, where does his departure leave this giant sanctions busting operation that he's helped set up? Like the supply chain that has been very well under way funneling
“parts to Russia? Yeah, I think Phil Chenkov is an important player for Russia for the 20th”
director, but he's still only one player. So him fleeing has definitely made it hard for Russia to get the technology it needs from Japan, but there are many other players. We know there are dozens of Russian spies in Japan alone, so there will be others that can take his place to unless something
drastically changed in Japan, whether it's the Espinage laws, whether it's a crackdown on the manufacturers,
the companies that are part of this supply chain, then somebody else is just going to pop up and replace Phil Chenkov and the supply chain will continue. I wonder, Jane, let's just say that Japan is able to crack down on all of this and does so tomorrow. It spells all the spies, stops the technology, ends everything. How meaningful would that actually be to Russia's war effort in Ukraine? It would be incredibly
“meaningful. The pipeline of these Japanese components to Russia is absolutely essential for Putin”
to keep waging his war against Ukraine. If that supply was cut off, Russia would not be able to maintain its weapons to build new weapons, particularly drones, ballistic missiles, all this high-tech equipment that the war has now become more dependent on. So Japan is playing a really high-stakes game here. If Japan takes meaningful action in a way that is bigger than just one spy, however important he is fleeing Japan, it has this real opportunity to change
the course of a war that has raged on for four years now. The question now is whether Japan's going to take the chance to do that? Jane, I have to ask, now that Phil Chenkov's cover has been blown, what does he do now? What can a spy do once everybody knows who they are? Well, he's almost certainly back in Russia and his foreign intelligence career is without a doubt over, you know, his face is out there, his name is out there, he won't be able to work as a spy abroad.
Again, what often happens with these spies whose covers are blown is that they get a hero's welcome back in Russia, often they get a medal or they get appointed to a spy school to train the next generations. So the site calls starts again. Jane Bradley, thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Rachel. Jane Bradley, she's an investigative reporter for the New York Times and you can get even more reporting. Jane Bradley's reporting, other people throughout the newsroom, by downloading
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Download it and we'll be right back.
Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, a federal judge in Boston dismissed the Trump
“administration's anti-Semitism lawsuit against Harvard, dealing a blow to the White House's efforts”
to force the school to make a deal with them. The Trump administration had accused the university of turning, quote, "ablined-eyed anti-Semitism and discrimination against Jews and
Israelis," after the war in Gaza began. The lawsuit was part of a broader pressure campaign
“to force the university to comply with a variety of demands relating to its handling of anti-Semitism”
and race and admissions. The judge said the anti-Semitic incidents cited by the administration were, quote, "too isolated and episodic to show that Harvard was breaking the law."
And, the board of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., voted on Thursday to put President Trump's
name back on the side of the building beneath the main sign. That's according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The president's name had been added to the building last year, but a judge had ordered that it'd be taken down, finding that only Congress of the authority to change the institution's name. The move by the Trump-aligned board of the Kennedy Center is an aggressive test of the judge's decision.
Today's episode was produced by Shannon Lynn, Jessica Chung, and Olivia Nat, was helped from Adrian Hurst. It was edited by Annie Minoff with help from Maria Burn, Chris Haxle, and Michael Benoit. contains music by Alicia B. YouTube, Dan Wong, and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Wonderley. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel A. Rooms. See you on Sunday.
This week on the Wirecutter Show, it's really tempting the shop online, but there is no replacement for shopping in person, especially for sofas. It's so hard to shop online.
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