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Aeroflex, which is no longer trading, was busted by the State Department for hundreds of International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) violations "largely consisting of unauthorized exports." There is no indication that the company broke the law by delivering the rad-chips to Riol-Chemie--the transactions occurred years before the U.S. government announced that the German company was a secret part of Putin's illicit arms smuggling operation.

The repeated links between companies accused of laundering the $230 million and Riol-Chemie may point to a wider, calculated scheme with far-reaching political implications. Money stolen from the Russian people--while the authorities turned a blind eye--was apparently channelled into a black market weapons program. Whoever directed the dispersal of the stolen funds also played a top secret role in Russian national security.

"This clearly shows why Putin has become unhinged because of the Magnitsky investigation," said Bill Browder, who has led the anti-corruption campaign in the name of his former lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. "Every layer of this onion that is peeled, ever more dirty and dangerous information emerges."

Previous reports have also claimed that some of the stolen funds ended up in the hands of people connected to Syria's chemical weapons program.

The man given the task of shutting down the Magnitsky-inspired investigations that were blooming all over the world was Yury Chaika, one of Putin's top fixers and Russia's prosecutor-general up until last year. President Obama signed the anti-corruption Magnitsky Act into law in 2012, and Chaika's protégée, Veselnitskaya, was sent to make the case against the law at the notorious Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort in 2016.

Putin brought it up with Trump himself at the Helsinki summit in 2018. The former president listened, nodding along with a litany of distortions about election interference, Crimea, and Browder during a joint press conference.

Veselnitskaya was also part of the legal team defending Prevezon, another of the companies accused of laundering the stolen money, which was under investigation by the Southern District of New York. The case was eventually settled out of court with Prevezon paying $6 million. Velselnitskaya was charged with obstruction of justice for colluding with Chaika's office in Moscow to doctor evidence submitted to the court.

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