A businessman from Kansas faces up to 25 years in prison after pleading guilty to selling and exporting aviation-related equipment to Russia, starting in 2020 and continuing up to March 2023, a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Cyril Gregory Buyanovsky, 60, the owner and president of KanRus Trading Company Inc., will be sentenced at a hearing set for March 21. He pleaded guilty on December 19 to, despite sanctions placed on Russia, exporting “sophisticated and controlled avionics equipment” to customers in Russia without the required licences from the US Department of Commerce and to conspiring to illegally launder money, according to a US Department of Justice statement.

Buyanovsky admitted that he conspired with others, including co-defendant and former KanRus vice president Douglas Edward Robertson, 56, to smuggle US-origin avionics equipment to end users in Russia as well as those in other countries. Robertson separately pleaded not guilty to the charges against him on December 20.

Buyanovsky said that, among other actions, he had knowingly filed false export forms with the US government in which he lied about the exports’ value, end users, and end destinations, or failed to file the forms altogether.

On at least one occasion in 2021, in violation of export controls, he and Robertson allegedly smuggled a Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) to be repaired in the US by removing the FSB sticker from the device before sending it to a US repair company and then reattaching the sticker before shipping back to Russia.

Buyanovsky further admitted that after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and the US tightened its export controls concerning Russia, he and other conspirators continued to buy and export US-origin avionics equipment to customers in Russia “and took numerous steps to hide their illegal activity from law enforcement” including lying about the intended end-users, shipping goods through intermediaries in Armenia, the United Arab Emirates, and Cyprus, and using bank accounts in countries such as Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Cyprus and the UAE to funnel money from the Russian customers to KanRus.

Buyanovsky faces a maximum of 20 years for money laundering and five for conspiracy.