The white sand beaches, turquoise waters and exclusive resorts of this South Asian archipelago attract millions of tourists each year. However, behind this postcard scenario, a new business has quietly emerged: a network of companies that helps Russia circumvent international sanctions.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in merchandise restricted or destined for sanctioned companies has changed hands at the airport, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with Western officials. Some of these products have both civil and military use. Airport cargo holds are frequently filled with aircraft spare parts and electronic components, as well as other regulated goods, documents and official sources reveal.
The volume of goods transiting through the Maldives is relatively small compared to Russia's main routes to evade sanctions — such as China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, which together account for about $15 billion annually in restricted Russian imports. Despite this, trafficking through the Maldives, hitherto unpublished in the press, reveals the scope of the Russian strategy to circumvent Western restrictions, turning even small and unexpected corners of the planet into supply routes.
Throughout more than four years of war, Moscow has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to detect loopholes in the sanctions regime, forcing Western officials to play cat and mouse in their attempts to stem the flow of goods that sustain the war effort and the Russian economy.
The documentation analyzed by the Journal – air waybills, cargo manifests and emails between logistics companies – illustrates how this mechanism works in the Maldives.
Every morning a commercial flight from Aeroflot, the main Russian airline, lands at Malé airport. There, local intermediaries coordinated with logistics companies linked to Russia manage the customs clearance of products from the United States, Europe and China. The cargo is then loaded onto Aeroflot flights, which take off about two hours later back to Moscow with the shipments.
Once in Russia, the products are distributed, in certain cases, to entities under sanctions. These include S7 Airlines, Russia's largest national airline, and its maintenance subsidiaries, which have faced serious difficulties in obtaining spare parts for their fleet of aging aircraft.
"This shows the existence of effective channels far removed from the usual suspects," said Pavlo Shkurenko, a sanctions researcher at the Institute of the kyiv School of Economics.
The Maldivian government and the state-owned company managing the airfield, Maldives Airports Company, did not respond to requests for comment.
The Maldives archipelago is made up of more than a thousand islands, many of which are home to a single hotel complex. More than two million tourists visit the islands annually, captivated by transparent waters where they can observe turtles, manta rays and whale sharks. Malé, in contrast, seems like another world: it is one of the most densely populated cities on the planet, whose narrow streets bustle with incessant traffic of motorcycles and mopeds.
Part of Russia's success in channeling goods through the Maldives lies in its economic ties with the island country. Russian tourists represent the second largest nationality after Chinese citizens. Therefore, a diplomatic crisis with Moscow would threaten the Maldivian economy, which is still recovering from the setback suffered by the tourism sector during the pandemic.
Currently, the Maldivian government not only receives funds through taxes applied to tourism, but also thanks to the commercial boom. The Maldives Airports Company reported record profits in 2024, positioning itself as the most profitable state-owned company in the country. The entity collects commercial and cargo handling fees, in addition to reselling fuel at a profit margin.
Certain supplies sent from Malé to Moscow are classified under the sanctions as dual-use goods, which implies that they can be used for both civil and military purposes; for example, to supply the punished Russian aeronautical industry.
Among the registered shipments are microchips suitable for both civil technology and sophisticated missile guidance systems, optical instruments necessary in satellites intended to monitor enemy troops, and high-strength aerospace bolts and rivets, useful indifferently for passenger planes, military fighters or long-range rockets.
Official Maldives customs statistics reflect a negligible volume of direct exports to Russia between 2022 and 2025: just about $2,300 worth of tuna and $25 worth of information brochures. However, Russian trade data compiled by Import Genius, a US research firm, shows that Russia's imports from the Maldives - a nation with virtually no industrial fabric - skyrocketed to more than $630 million in 2022 (the year the full-scale invasion began), up from just $7 million in 2021.
Russia imported $160 million in 2024, the last full year available in Import Genius records. The firm's research director, William George, indicated that these figures probably underestimate the true volume of bilateral trade, and highlighted that Russian authorities began censoring fragments of this information in 2024 before completely blocking access in early 2025.
The United States and Europe imposed widespread sanctions against Moscow in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, aimed at weakening its industrial base and marginalizing it from global trade. As part of these measures, they froze nearly $300 billion in Russian central bank assets and disconnected major financial institutions from the Swift messaging system. At the same time, a network of export controls cut off Moscow's access to advanced microchips, aerospace technology and industrial machinery essential to sustaining its domestic production and war effort.
Recently, Western officials' efforts have focused on closing loopholes and criminalizing evasion methods. Both Washington and the European Union are increasingly targeting third-country intermediaries, such as banks and logistics companies that facilitate the covert flow of Western supplies or the diversion of opaque oil revenues to Russia.
The Maldives executive is under increasing pressure from the United States and Europe to close this route, according to official sources consulted. Local authorities are aware of the problem and working to resolve it, according to a person familiar with the matter.
One of the factors that complicates the situation is the shortage of staff at the Maldivian customs office, which means that goods in transit receive minimal inspections, according to the same source. Cargo in transit is generally not subject to physical inspections, but control is based almost exclusively on documentation.
Trade, far from slowing down, continues to rise. In July, the Maldives Airports Company announced a historical record for the daily volume of merchandise in transit through the airport, reaching 126 tons of cargo in a single day. Aeroflot concentrated 12% of outbound cargo transportation during the first half of the year, according to state broadcaster PSM News.
The documents reviewed by the Journal reflect that, when the cargo initially landed, the name of the exporting company and the alleged buyer appeared on the air waybill. However, once in the Maldives, a network of opaque local companies – such as Freight Care and Go Investment – intervene to alter the shipping documents and move the merchandise directly along the tarmac, ensuring that it never leaves the airport premises or is registered as formal entry into the country.
Cargo is never classified as import and goes through minimal customs checks before being transferred from one plane to another, official sources confirmed. A new air waybill is then issued for the flight connecting Male to Moscow Sheremetyevo International Airport. This document omits the name of the original selling company, as revealed by the analyzed documentation and official Western sources.
As an example, in May 2024 the German company Kraemer Mining sold pumps, batteries, V-belts and other components valued at about 9,000 euros (about $10,400) to Peretsvo, a firm based in Kyrgyzstan. The goods first flew from Düsseldorf (Germany) to Malé on an Emirates plane. Freight Care, listed on the air waybill as the first contact, processed the documentation required to manage transit through the Maldivian airport, according to Western officials and the company itself.
Days later, the shipment embarked on an Aeroflot flight to Moscow. The airline issued a second air waybill without any reference to Kraemer Mining or the origin of the products. Instead, the new document designated as recipient Gruppa Kompaniy Tehno, a Russian importer located in Krasnoyarsk, the industrial and economic center of Siberia. Neither Gruppa Kompaniy Tehno nor Kraemer Mining responded to requests for comment.
The Journal located two different addresses for Freight Care: one listed in air waybills and another in the country's official business registry. Both targeted adjacent office buildings in Malé, with the Aeroflot branch located right in the middle of them. When visiting both properties, no trace of the company's offices was found.
Hussain Waheed, CEO of Freight Care, stated that the firm managed merchandise in transit in Malé destined for Russia, but denied having knowingly collaborated in the shipment of items destined for the manufacture of weapons. "We do not support any war," he said.
For its part, the address attributed to Go Investment in the documents corresponded to a small electronics store. That same address was associated with multiple companies in the Maldives commercial registry. When contacted, the individual registered as CEO or member of the board of directors of all these companies stated that he could not speak and hung up the phone, without responding to subsequent messages.
