The U.S. Commerce Department has added 45 Russian and 58 Chinese companies it claims have ties to those countries’ militaries Monday, restricting exports of certain goods and technology to the designated entities.
The number of Russian aviation, rocket and nuclear companies with alleged military ties is nearly double that of the initial draft list reported by Reuters last month.
It also includes Russia’s Defense Ministry and its Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the spying agency blamed for this month’s massive cyberattack on U.S. government agencies.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the list of 103 Chinese and Russian entities sets a new process to “assist exporters in screening their customers for military end users.” Its publication comes after the Commerce Department expanded export restrictions and broadened military end use definitions targeting Russia, China and Venezuela in the spring.
“The Department recognizes the importance of leveraging its partnerships with U.S. and global companies to combat efforts by China and Russia to divert U.S. technology for their destabilizing military programs,” Ross said in a press release.
Sanctioned space chief Dmitry Rogozin was among the first Russian officials to react to the U.S. military list, calling it “dumb” and “illegal.” Soyuz rocket maker Progress and spacecraft scientific center TsNIIMash are two Roscosmos space agency entities added to the U.S. military list.
“They’re illegal like all previously imposed sanctions against Russian individuals and legal entities,” Rogozin told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.
“They’re dumb because the ‘military end user’ label is arbitrarily assigned to companies have not and are not such,” he said.
Russia and China Plan Joint Lunar Space Station
Russia and China agreed Tuesday to build a lunar space station, as Moscow seeks to modernize its extraterrestrial might and catch up with the United States in the space race.
Russia, which sent the first man into space during the Soviet Union, has been lagging behind Washington and Beijing in the exploration of the Moon and Mars.
Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said in a statement that a memorandum was signed by its head Dmitry Rogozin and Zhang Kejian of China’s National Space Administration (CNSA).
It said the lunar station will be designed as a «complex of experimental research facilities created on the surface and/or in the orbit of the Moon.»
It would be available for use by other interested countries and international partners, the statement said, without details about the completion date.
Despite its former Soviet glory, Russia’s space sector has suffered greatly in recent years from a lack of financing and corruption.
Moscow and Washington are collaborating in the space sector — one of the few areas of cooperation left between the Cold War rivals.
Russia last year lost its monopoly for manned flights to the International Space Station (ISS) after the first succesful mission of the U.S. company Space X.
Elon Musks’s Space X is planning a trip to the Moon that will be open to several members of the public.
China has expressed its space ambitions, launching last year its Tianwen-1 probe that is currently orbiting Mars.
China in December successfully brought samples of the Moon back to Earth, in a first mission of this type in over 40 years.
