A logistics company staffed by veterans of Russia’s defunct postal operation in Germany has been quietly moving sanctioned microelectronics from European supermarkets to Moscow — exploiting a legal loophole in how international parcels are checked at borders.
Advertisements for the service appear on candy shelves and beside freezer cabinets in Russian-owned supermarkets across Germany. The pitch is straightforward: send a package to Russia. What the ad does not mention is that the service has been routing shipments containing goods banned under EU sanctions through Poland and Belarus to street addresses in Moscow and St. Petersburg — in apparent defiance of the export restrictions Western governments consider their most powerful economic lever against the Kremlin.
The operation was exposed in a joint investigation published on March 7, 2026, by the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which includes Politico, BILD, WELT and other outlets. Reporters sent five parcels containing banned electronic components — rendered inoperable before packing — and tracked them with GPS devices across roughly 1,100 miles. All five arrived at their destinations in Russia.
The company at the centre
The network’s operational hub is LS Logistics Solution GmbH, a firm registered in Cologne in December 2022 — just months after the EU tightened sanctions following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Its top positions, including customs manager and head of customer service, were filled by former employees of RusPost GmbH, the now-defunct German subsidiary of Russia’s state postal service Pochta Rossii, according to LinkedIn profiles reviewed by reporters.
RusPost GmbH collapsed in early 2022 when expanded sanctions cut off its business model. In March of that year, German customs conducting random checks on postal traffic to Moscow discovered sanctioned goods — cash, jewellery, and electrical appliances — in numerous RusPost packages. The Berlin public prosecutor’s office launched an investigation and charged a former managing director with 62 counts of attempting to violate Germany’s Foreign Trade and Payments Act over an eight-month period. Criminal proceedings are ongoing.
LS Logistics listed its official address as a residential semi-detached house in Cologne, across from a church, where reporters found an overflowing mailbox shared with dozens of other apparently dormant companies. The actual operations run out of a large warehouse complex in Berlin-Schönefeld, a few minutes from the capital’s international airport — a building reporters describe as a grey industrial structure stacked floor to ceiling with sorted parcels, with trucks arriving and departing regularly through the night.
The Uzbek label
What gives the operation its legal camouflage is a detail printed on every parcel: the logo and shipping labels of UzPost, the state postal service of Uzbekistan.
Uzbekistan is not subject to EU sanctions. UzPost maintains close institutional ties to the Russian postal service, and the CEO of Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries recently acquired a significant stake in the Uzbek operator, according to media reports. When asked about its role in the scheme, UzPost told investigators it works with private postal service providers and that those partners can use its solutions for deliveries — a response that raised more questions than it answered.
The problem, according to Germany’s Federal Network Agency, is that UzPost has no authorisation to perform postal operations in Germany. The agency told reporters it was “currently reviewing” the case and would pursue penalties against LS Logistics if it found the company was using Uzbek documents without authorisation.
When reporters brought parcels labelled as containing books, scarves and hats – but actually holding disabled-sanctioned electronics – to Russian supermarket counters in Berlin, staff accepted them without inspection at 13 euros per kilogram, declining to issue receipts.
The route
GPS tracking showed the parcels moving from the Berlin supermarkets to the Schönefeld warehouse, where they sat for several days before being loaded onto 40-tonne trucks. The trucks drove east along the A2 motorway through Poland, past Warsaw, and reached the border crossing at Brest, the Belarusian city where, more than a century ago, Russia signed its peace pact with Germany to exit the First World War.
Belarus has been under its own set of EU sanctions since 2022, imposed because Alexander Lukashenko’s government provided active support for Russia’s invasion. Those provisions should have stopped the shipments at the Polish-Belarusian border. They did not.
The reason lies in how postal traffic is treated differently from regular freight under European customs rules. Goods moving by container ship or rail require full export declarations; postal parcels benefit from simplified paperwork and are checked on a risk-based rather than comprehensive basis. That legal distinction, designed to keep postal systems moving efficiently, has become a structural loophole for sanctions evasion.
Two of the GPS trackers briefly lost their signal inside Belarus — consistent with the satellite navigation disruption that has been reported across Eastern Europe — but all five devices eventually registered the same outcome. The packages had arrived in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
A pattern, not an anomaly
Ukraine’s presidential envoy for sanctions policy, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, told investigators at the Ukrainian embassy in Berlin that his government regularly collects intelligence on exactly these kinds of schemes and shares it with international partners. His assessment of the collective response was blunt: “Nobody is doing enough, if you look at the number of cases.”
The Schönefeld operation is not the only case. On February 2, 2026 — days after the initial investigation was published — German prosecutors announced the arrest of five people in a separate but parallel case involving a logistics company based in the Baltic Sea port of Lübeck, which allegedly arranged around 16,000 shipments of goods worth at least 30 million euros to more than 20 sanctioned Russian arms companies. That network was “presumably operated by Russian state agencies”, according to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office.
German customs had already searched LS Logistics’ Berlin offices in August 2024 on suspicion of sanctions violations. That investigation produced no results.
Why microelectronics matter
The goods moving through these networks are not incidental. Microelectronics — chips, sensors, navigation modules, and communications components — are essential to the precision weapons Russia has been deploying against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. Since 2022, investigators and defence analysts have repeatedly recovered Western-manufactured electronics inside Russian missiles and drones retrieved from Ukrainian territory.
Western export controls were designed specifically to cut off this supply. The EU and its allies have built a Common High Priority Items List of dual-use technologies that Russia has been actively seeking to import through neighbouring countries. But the scale of the evasion problem has proved difficult to contain.
“Sanctions enforcement is whack-a-mole,” David Goldwyn, who worked on sanctions policy at the U.S. State Department and now chairs the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center’s energy advisory group, told Politico. “It’s a hard process, and you have to constantly be adapting to how the evaders are adapting.”
Germany tightens the rules
In January 2026, the Bundestag passed amendments to Germany’s Foreign Trade and Payments Act, expanding the range of sanctions violations subject to criminal penalties and integrating a broader EU directive on enforcement. The move was presented as a signal that Berlin intended to close the gaps that investigations like this one have exposed.
LS Logistics, for its part, denied that the system was designed for evasion. Managing director Anjelika Crone told investigators that the company’s internal controls make sanctions violations “virtually impossible” and that it was “not immune to fraudulent misdeclarations”—suggesting the blame lay with customers who lied about what they were shipping. Crone declined to answer further questions, citing data protection and confidentiality concerns. Former RusPost director Alexey Grigoryev, whose presence was observed at the Schönefeld warehouse during the investigation, did not respond to repeated calls.
The postal system that once operated with official German authorisation under RusPost’s banner has, by the investigation’s account, simply reconstituted itself under a new name, new labels, and a routing structure designed to stay just inside the line of what customs officers will inspect.
