NEW YORK – A New Jersey man who was among seven people charged with smuggling electronic components to help Russia’s war effort pleaded guilty Friday to conspiracy to commit bank fraud and other charges, authorities said.

Vadim Yermolenko, 43, faces up to 30 years in prison for his role in a transnational procurement and money laundering ring that sought to acquire sensitive electronics for the Russian military and intelligence services, Breon Peace, the prosecutor, said in a statement. American in Brooklyn.

Yermolenko, who lives in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey and has dual U.S. and Russian citizenship, was indicted along with six others in December 2022.

Prosecutors said the conspirators worked with two Moscow-based companies controlled by Russian intelligence services to acquire electronic components in the United States that have civilian uses but can also be used to make nuclear and hypersonic weapons and in quantum computing.

The export of the technology violated US sanctions, prosecutors said.

The prosecution was coordinated through the Justice Department’s KleptoCapture Task Force, an interagency entity dedicated to enforcing sanctions imposed after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement that Yermolenko “joins the nearly two dozen other criminals our KleptoCapture Task Force has brought to justice in U.S. courts over the past two and a half years for enabling military aggression by Russia”.

A message seeking comment was sent to Yermolenko’s attorney at the federal public defender’s office.

Prosecutors said Yermolenko helped create shell companies and bank accounts in the United States to move export-controlled money and goods. Money from one of their accounts was used to buy controlled sniper bullets for export that were intercepted in Estonia before they could be smuggled into Russia, they said.

One of Yermolenko’s co-defendants, Alexey Brayman of Merrimack, New Hampshire, previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and is awaiting sentencing.

Another, Vadim Konoshchenok, a suspected Russian Federal Security Service officer, was arrested in Estonia and extradited to the United States. He was later released from U.S. custody as part of a prisoner exchange that included Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and others.

The other four named in the indictment are Russian citizens who remain at large, prosecutors said.