US microchip manufacturers Intel Corporation, AMD, and Texas Instruments were accused in a series of lawsuits of failing to prevent their technology from ending up in Russian-made drones and missiles that have killed and injured civilians in Ukraine.
Those companies — along with Mouser Electronics, a seller and distributor of semiconductors — displayed “willful ignorance” as third parties resold restricted chips to Russia for use in weapons, in violation of US sanctions, according to one of the five lawsuits filed in Texas state court.
The lawsuits, filed on behalf of dozens of Ukrainian civilians by Mikal Watts and prominent law firm Baker & Hostetler, cite five attacks between 2023 and 2025 that killed dozens of people. One attack allegedly involved Iranian-made drones with components associated with Intel and AMD, while the others involved Russian-made KH-101 cruise missiles and Iskander ballistic missiles.
“These companies know their chip technology is making its way into Russia,” Watts, a veteran US mass-tort lawyer, said. He called the US companies “merchants of death” that were making a “farce” of US sanctions law.
Berkshire Hathaway-owned Mouser Electronics is accused of facilitating the transfer of chips made by Intel, Texas Instruments and others to shell companies controlled by Russian proxies.
One suit said that Mouser’s decisions and logistics operations “were a substantial domestic component of the misconduct that foreseeably contributed to Plaintiffs’ injuries abroad.”
We’re proud that the members of the B4Ukraine coalition — Emily Patterson of State Capture Accountability Project and Svitlana Val’ko of International Partnership for Human Rights (IPHR) — played a part in making these lawsuits a reality.
One of the cases mentioned in the lawsuit was previously investigated by B4Ukraine members — The Independent Anti-Corruption Commission (NAKO) and IPHR in a joint report: “Terror in the details: Western-made Components in Russia’s Shahed-136 Attacks.” It concerns the drone attack on the night of March 22, 2023. In Rzhyshchiv, Kyiv region, UAVs struck a school and two nearby dormitories. Nine people were killed, and another 29 injured.
NAKO Senior Researcher Victoria Vyshnivska emphasized the exceptional importance of these lawsuits: “American electronics make up between 60 and 80 percent of various types of Russian weapons and military equipment. They have no high-quality domestic equivalents to Western microchips — whether they are considered (non-)critical or not. That is why every microchip, and especially the FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Array) mentioned in these lawsuits, is so crucial for them. Without them, a missile or a drone is just explosives in a casing.”