Documents raise doubts that Rheinmetall has withdrawn from the arms deal with Russia since the annexation of Crimea. Getty Images / Wolfgang Deuter, picture alliance / dpa | Oliver Berg, Boriskovsky Khotilovo, collage: Dominik Schmitt
Rheinmetall has rejected several reports on dubious deals with Russia in recent months. However, the information available is increasingly raising doubts about the statements made by the armaments group.
Research by Business Insider shows that long after the annexation of Crimea, Rheinmetall concluded contracts with a Russian armaments company. In addition, the Russian commercial register gives the impression that Rheinmetall only quietly renamed its Russian subsidiary at the end of 2022 instead of going out of business. The group had announced after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that it would discontinue its business in Russia.
At our request, Rheinmetall sticks to its previous statement – they have withdrawn from the business. The company does not go into other aspects, such as the Russian subsidiary.
The Ukraine war leads to the rearmament of armies worldwide. The German armaments giant Rheinmetall reports new orders almost weekly. One of the biggest deals in the company’s history is imminent: Rheinmetall is the favorite in the $45 billion tender for the US Bradley infantry fighting vehicle. “You don’t have to be ashamed of profits,” Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger recently said in an interview with ZDF.
In fact, Rheinmetall has been criticized again and again for months. Because despite lucrative orders from Ukraine’s allies, journalistic research has suggested that the armaments group is also making profits on the Russian market: through alleged deliveries for a command post, spare parts for trucks or activities of a Russian subsidiary. Was the Russian market too attractive for Rheinmetall to let go?
So far, Rheinmetall has repeatedly rejected the allegations: the company has not supplied any military products to Russia since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and after the start of the Ukraine war in February 2022, civilian business with Vladimir Putin’s empire was also discontinued.
New documents raise doubts about this account. Specifically, it is about the business relationship between the Russian company Aviaistok and Rheinmetall Landsysteme GmbH. Among other things, the Rheinmetall subsidiary manufactures the group’s tanks and is assigned to the armaments business. Aviaistok is a leading ground support equipment company in the Russian aviation industry.
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Business Insider has a contract between the two companies from 2018 – four years after the annexation of Crimea and the subsequent ban on supplying military products to Russia. The contract is about so-called ground launch devices, which help aircraft turbines to reach the necessary speed before take-off. With the MSU 200, Rheinmetall manufactures one of the most powerful ground launch vehicles in the world. The German group has been selling this to the Russian company Aviaistok for a long time, which sells it on in Russia under the name AIST-6.
Did Rheinmetall really no longer do any armaments business in Russia after the annexation of Crimea, as claimed? A contract challenges that. Aviaistok / Screenshot from Business Insider
The constellation is highly explosive: On the one hand, Rheinmetall is explicitly promoting the military use of the launcher. On the other hand, Aviaistok’s customer base includes not only civil airports, but also military bases of the Russian Air Force. For example, the Boriskovsky Khotilovo military airport, which lies between Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Aircraft manufacturers are also listed as Aviaistok customers. For example, the Russian United Aircraft Corporation, which brings together numerous companies from Soviet times. The state conglomerate builds and supplies the fighter jets that Russia uses to attack Ukraine on a daily basis. From public data it can also be seen that after the war began, Aviaistok received several orders from the FSBI SLO Special Flight Unit. This operates the Russian Presidential Fleet.
Did Rheinmetall provide Vladimir Putin with initial help in the war against Ukraine? As can be seen from Russian customs data, the armaments counter delivered ground launch devices to Aviaistok until 2021. When asked, Rheinmetall explained: “In the course of regular sales work, a cooperation with the Russian company Aviaistok was established in 2018. The focus here was on civilian business.” Between March 2018 and July 2019, deliveries from Germany were then also made to “civilian customers in Russia”. The business was then handled by a subsidiary in Canada until 2021. All deliveries were made with “official approval”.
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Business Insider asked the responsible Federal Office of Economics and Export Control (BAFA) whether deliveries of military ground launch devices to Russia had been approved in individual cases since 2014. A spokesman explains that without more detailed information about the property, no reliable evaluation is possible. In response to an earlier request dated June 19, 2023, the authority pointed out that it was not possible to comment on individual export transactions with regard to trade and business secrets. Nevertheless, Bafa confirms that there is an arms embargo on the Russian Federation. The export of armaments is strictly forbidden.
It is not the first time that Rheinmetall has declared that it has only supplied military products for civilian purposes. Research by Business Insider has shown that the international trade database Import Genius can be used to track more than 2,000 deliveries of truck spare parts from Rheinmetall subsidiary MS Motorservice to Russia between February and October 2022. The group announced that it had not supplied the parts itself. Instead, the customer was provided with the spare parts for civilian use. The customer himself was responsible for the import. The “last delivery of shipments for customers in Russia took place (…) in June 2022,” Rheinmetall said in response to our inquiry. How civilian use was secured remains unclear.
New information from an Indian data provider now even shows that Russian customs even recorded imports of spare parts from Rheinmetall subsidiary MS Motorservice from Germany in Russia until mid-2023. According to these data, the Rheinmetall company hired a company to deliver the parts to Russia. Confronted with the new allegations, Rheinmetall reiterates its previous statement that it only made goods available for the Russian market until June 2022 and that it did not conclude any new business after the start of the war. According to the company, subsequent deliveries can only be explained by logistical circumstances. For example, if customers had made interim storage in non-Russian countries. That would mean: The truck parts lay around for a year before they were delivered to Russia.
You can believe this, but you don’t have to. Documents from the Russian commercial register raise further questions: It is not clear why Rheinmetall renamed its Russian subsidiary at the end of 2022 when the business was allegedly discontinued.
Background: In 2013, the German group founded the Russian company Rheinmetall Ltd. Since then, the Moscow-based company has generated hundreds of thousands of euros in sales every year. At the request of “t-onlineAt the end of last year, Rheinmetall played down the role of the Russian subsidiary: The Russian company was also active as an automotive supplier in the civil business and in this context supplied spare parts to private car workshops. The operational business has been discontinued.
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What is explosive is that just a few weeks after the media report on the Russian subsidiary, it changed its name. Instead of Rheinmetall Ltd, it has since been called MS Motorservice Training Ltd. and continues to employ staff in Russia. And although, according to Rheinmetall, it ceased operations in the course of 2022, it was still able to increase its sales in the fiscal year. Rheinmetall did not answer questions about how this was possible.
Documents available to Business Insider show that Vladimir S., the head of the technical division of MS Motorservice Russia, held training courses for the products of Rheinmetall’s automotive division at the end of April 2022, two months after the start of the war. “Purchasing and sales managers” were named as the target group. They were invited to the Cosmos Yaroslavl Hotel near Moscow. Rheinmetall does not want to answer why purchasing and sales managers need to be trained in a market from which they have withdrawn.