From a building in Tokyo, Russia turned Japan into a den of spies against Ukraine

The country’s weak spy laws and burgeoning high-tech industry have made it a key player in the Russian war effort. According to Ukrainian government estimates, 90% of Russian missiles and drones contain Japanese components.

At the center of the operation in Tokyo is a secret Russian military intelligence unit known as the 20th Directionwhose role has never been publicly revealed. According to current and former officials at five Western intelligence agencies, their officers, posing as diplomats or businessmen, are engaged in buying or stealing military technology and smuggling it into Russia. According to those sources, the man who oversees the operations of the 20th Directorate in Tokyo maintains a false identity as an employee of the Russian state airline Aeroflot. It plays a crucial role in supplying the Russian war machine.

The price of this effort is evident in the nightly attacks on Ukrainian cities and the harshness of the battlefield. After four years of war, Russia persists, in part, thanks to its continuous access to technologies such as those acquired from Japan. Following the attack by a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile that destroyed a residential building in kyiv and killed 24 people in May, investigators examined the wreckage. According to kyiv, they discovered that the missile had been guided by Japanese components whose export to Russia is prohibited in many places.

Using confidential documents, corporate records and interviews with dozens of officials on three continents, The New York Times began to rebuild how the 20th Directorate operates. Most of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release information publicly.

Ukraine has presented Japan with evidence that its technology is used in Russian attacks. However, the Japanese government, despite its strong support for Ukraine, has been slow to act. Japan has been known as a haven for espionagepartly due to the restrictions imposed after the Second World War by the victors, which kept their intelligence services weak. Japan doesn’t even have a foreign intelligence agency. “We have a sense of crisis about this situation,” said Akihisa Shiozaki, a lawmaker from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and a former lawyer who prosecuted industrial espionage cases.

Japan’s foreign ministry did not respond to detailed questions about espionage, but said the government had worked with the West to ban the export of military items to Russia. “Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is an outrageous act that shakes the very foundations of the international order,” the ministry stated in a note. However, It appears that Russian spies are operating right under the noses of the Japanese authorities.

Aeroflot’s Tokyo office is a ten-minute walk from the headquarters of the National Police Agency, which investigates espionage. Western spies claim that it is there, in the airline, on the 22nd floor, where the man from Directorate 20 in Tokyo directs his lethal operation. His name is Maksim Filchenkov.

Russia urgently needed high-tech components when Filchenkov, 49, took up his post in Tokyo in February 2024. The war in Ukraine was shifting from World War I-style artillery battles to drone warfare and the Ukrainians had the technological advantage. To sustain itself, Russia needed new technology. China could help, but for the army’s most advanced weaponry There was no substitute for high-tech equipment, machine tools and other components that many companies were prohibited from selling to Russia.

That’s when Filchenkov, a veteran officer of the Russian military espionage, the GRU, enters the scene. With a mission in Japan under his belt, he had the experience necessary to find the necessary equipment and move it to Russia.

According to business records and interviews, Filchenkov began establishing relationships with companies that transport goods from Japan to Russia. Western officials have warned Japan that such relationships help the GRU buy sensitive technology under false pretenses and ship it to Russia, sometimes using fraudulent shipping records. It is in this aspect where the 20th Directorate stands out. While the unit’s history is unclear, officials indicated it existed before the war in Ukraine. Since that conflict began, the sources added, it has been central to the Kremlin’s efforts to obtain military technology.

GRU spies have used jobs at Aeroflot as cover since the Soviet era while searching for Western technology. The entrance to the Aeroflot office in Tokyo It looks like a prison door, with a narrow window slit and a bell. At the beginning of 2026, a middle-aged woman with blonde hair and a Russian Orthodox cross around her neck opened the door. She seemed surprised to have visitors. The woman said that Filchenkov was not there and that she did not know when he would return. Aeroflot is not specifically on Japan’s blacklist. However, Aeroflot’s official partners are still active.

One of them, Proco Air, bills itself as a “bridge between Japan and Russia.” Proco rents cargo space on airlines that fly to countries where Aeroflot operates, such as Sri Lanka or Uzbekistan. Aeroflot picks up the cargo there and transports it to Russia. There is nothing illegal or unusual about this. According to shipping records, Japan is the world’s largest exporter of the sensitive dual-use technology sought by the Kremlin. Smugglers do not need to take that equipment directly to Russia; They just need to ship it somewhere willing to sell it to them. For example, the main destination for Japanese sensitive technology is Vietnam, which in turn is the largest exporter of sensitive technology to Russia.