WASHINGTON, March 21. /TASS/. Western firms have purchased titanium worth hundreds of millions of dollars from Russia since February 2022, despite the anti-Russian sanctions, The Washington Post wrote.

As the publication notes, based on the data at its disposal on Russian exports in 2022-2023, the Russian company VSMPO-Avisma, which was not subject to EU and US sanctions, exported titanium to Western countries for two years in a row in amounts of more than $300 million annually.

Most of the supplies went to those Western countries that supported Ukraine, including the UK, Germany, France, and the USA. The purchases illustrate that the West remains dependent on Russia for certain goods, despite promises to sever economic ties with Moscow, the newspaper said.

"Russia could shut off the flow of these … materials and leave companies critical to national defense and civil aviation scrambling," said William George, director of research at ImportGenius, the company that supplied the trade data gathered from an official Russian database to The Washington Post.

On September 25, 2023, the US Department of Commerce decided to impose export restrictions on 28 entities from Russia, Germany, China, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman, Pakistan, Finland, including VSMPO-Avisma.

VSMPO-Avisma is a monopolist in the domestic titanium industry, producing a third of the world's titanium for the aviation industry. On March 7, 2023, Boeing announced the suspension of the purchase of Russian titanium. A week later, Ural Boeing Manufacturing JSC, a joint venture between VSMPO-Avisma and Boeing, announced the suspension of its activities amid anti-Russian sanctions.