Polish firm loses contract in Ukraine after accusations of military cooperation with Russia

A Polish company accused of cooperating with Russia in the arms industry has lost its contract in Ukraine. This was reported by the Polish radio station RMF FM.

The company in question is Seco/Warwick, which, according to a journalistic investigation by Russia’s The Insider and the Czech Investigace, along with eight other Western European companies, allegedly cooperated with the Russian arms industry. The Polish company denies this and speaks of sabotage.

According to journalists, Seco/Warwick supplied specialized industrial furnaces to the Russians. This equipment, they note, is a dual-use product. It can be used in the aerospace or mechanical engineering industries.

However, the company completely denies these reports. It admits that it sold the furnace to the Russians, but before the outbreak of a full-scale war. When the Russian invasion started, it broke all contacts with its subsidiaries in Russia and started selling them.

Katarzyna Savko from Seco/Warwick says the timing of these publications is not accidental. “We had a big contract in Ukraine,” she added.

“Unfortunately, we lost this big contract because our client received information from his ministry about the appearance of this report. That was the end of our contacts,” explains Katarzyna Savko.

Earlier, German investigative journalists found that, despite the sanctions, in 2023 German companies could have delivered more than 300 shipments to Russia that could have been used to produce vehicle parts or ammunition.

The German media obtained Russian customs documents, which revealed that by the end of December 2023, more than 300 deliveries from German manufacturers had been made to Russia.

Most of them are large industrial machines or CNC (computer numerical control) machines.

These computer-controlled machines can, for example, cut steel, bend sheet metal, and weld metal parts in a fully automatic mode.

The journalists said that through video and photography, they found out that the Russian companies Parsec, Kamaz, NIR, and Industrial Solutions supply the Russian military with engines and parts for aircraft and missiles.

All of these companies use German equipment, which, according to customs documents, continued to be imported last year. It is possible that Russia will receive such machines this year as well, the journalists noted.

The TV company also managed to identify more than 30 German manufacturers whose machines were imported to Russia last year, many of them located in Baden-Württemberg, a traditional place of machine building.

The manufacturers include Walter Maschinenbau, Vollmer, Fein GmbH, Heller, etc.

According to journalists, in about two-thirds of the cases, the machines were imported to Russia through Turkey: some Turkish intermediaries have direct ties to Russia, and some were founded by Russian entrepreneurs.