A company from the Rostec corporation has signed contracts for the purchase of American and German equipment worth RUB 720 million to expand the production of electronic warfare.

The Agentstvo publication reported on this, citing its own investigation.

In December, the Kaluga Research Institute of Radio Engineering (KNIRTI), which produces systems for aircraft of the Sukhoi Design Bureau, signed contracts for RUB 720 million ($7.4 million) to import equipment from the German company Rohde & Schwarz and the American company Keysight.

The Kaluga Research Institute of Radio Engineering was founded in 1957 to develop electronic warfare systems and is part of the Radioelectronic Technologies concern of the Rostec Group. In particular, Su-24, Su-27, Su-30, Su-33, Su-34, and Su-35 aircraft are equipped with its systems. The institute also developed electronic warfare systems for staging helicopters and for the Su-57.

The purchase is evidenced by documentation on the public procurement website, which the Agentstvo found during its investigation. According to three government contracts, this equipment is needed to increase production of “onboard electronic warfare systems.”

As the publication has found out, the bulk of the equipment worth RUB 620 million is to be manufactured in Germany, the Czech Republic and Malaysia by the international concern Rohde & Schwarz, headquartered in Munich.

The concern specializes in the production of electronic equipment, which it supplies to the armies of Germany, Norway, and Canada, among others. The Kaluga Institute is interested in analyzers and analog signal generators, vector analyzers of electrical circuits, power supplies, and oscilloscopes.

The institute will pay the remaining RUB 100 million for multimeters and ultra-high-frequency analyzers from the American company Keysight. These products will be manufactured at the company’s plant in Malaysia.

The Institute was subjected to US sanctions in 2019 and EU sanctions in 2024, so it uses a gasket importer, Gradient, with which it has signed all contracts.

The company is supposed to deliver the equipment by the end of 2025. According to the public procurement website, deliveries are already underway. According to the acceptance certificates, Gradient handed over an SMA100B analog signal generator worth almost RUB 13 million to the institute at the end of December 2024.

Gradient company was established in 2019 and is owned and operated by Moscow resident Sergey Ivanov. According to the publication, the company began supplying Western equipment to government agencies in its first year of operation. As part of the first such contract, it sold a Keysight signal analyzer to military unit No. 95006. Until 2022, Gradient’s annual revenue did not exceed RUB 106 million, but in 2023 it grew 13 times at once, to RUB 965 million.

In January, investigative journalists exposed nine companies from the Czech Republic, Poland, and Switzerland that had supplied sanctioned industrial equipment to Russia.