Federal authorities said a Russian-Canadian citizen who wanted to make money from a plan to send millions of dollars of electronics to Russia for its Ukraine war is now facing up to 20 years in jail. Kristina Puzyreva from Montreal admitted to money laundering conspiracy on Monday in a federal court in New York, a Justice Department statement said.
She had been accused of wire fraud and breaking U.S. sanctions. “The defendant helped the scheme to avoid export rules and sanctions,” Breon Peace, a federal lawyer in Brooklyn, said in the statement. “The defendant cleaned the money … the export plan would not have worked without that.” Puzyreva, her husband Nikolay Goltsev, and Salimdzhon Nasriddinov from New York gave $7 million in electronic parts that could be used for different things to the Russian military, prosecutors said.
The scheme started in 2022 and Goltsev and Nasriddinov were also charged, the Justice Department said Monday. Their cases are still going on.
According to a DOJ statement in November, the parts ended up in Russian helicopters, missiles, tanks and other weapons and spy equipment used in Ukraine. The three defendants had contacts at electronics companies that gave parts to the Russian military and made many accounts to avoid sanctions and send parts for drones, guided missiles and other weapons, U.S. investigators said.
They got orders from Russia and used two fake companies in Brooklyn to buy American electronic parts for the Russian military for years. Puzyreva and Goltsev were linked to 298 shipments of banned technology worth $7 million in two years, the DOJ statement Monday said. Puzyreva did deals through Simatech Group, an electronics company in Montreal that got technology, electronics and mechanical parts for civilian and military use, prosecutors said. They sent the parts through other countries like Turkey, Hong Kong, India, China and the United Arab Emirates to get them to Russia, the Justice Department said.
They also went to New York several times to see Nasriddinov, and Puzyreva used different bank accounts with big cash deposits, which went to the couple’s accounts in Canada, the DOJ said. Authorities took about $1.7 million from the export plan, including $20,000 in cash from the hotel room in Manhattan where the couple was caught in late October, the Justice Department said. In a text message from January 2023 that the Justice Department showed, Goltsev told his wife that he had to make 80 accounts to clean $3 million and said his fingers hurt from typing. Puzyreva said, “Lot of money? We will get rich.” The war between Russia and Ukraine started on Feb. 24, 2022, when the Kremlin invaded and most U.N. members said no.
In the Justice Department statement Monday, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco talked about the “illegal invasion” that will be one year old soon and said the U.S. will go after “those who give critical U.S. technology to the Russian war machine.” A Commerce Department statement in November said some of the parts that Puzyreva and Goltsev sent were “very worrying because they were important for making advanced Russian weapons that can hit targets precisely, and Russia can’t make them and few others can.” Puzyreva’s sentencing date is not set.