Ukraine Military Lawsuits: U.S. Chips in Russian Weapons

Five Ukrainian civilians have sued four American companies — chipmakers Texas Instruments, Intel, and AMD, along with Texas-based component distributor Mouser Electronics — alleging that weak export controls let their semiconductors reach Russian missiles and drones that killed or injured family members in Ukraine. The Ukraine lawsuits against US chipmakers were filed in Dallas County state court on December 10, 2025, then removed to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in February 2026, where they are consolidated before Senior Judge Sidney Fitzwater under case number 3:25-cv-03400.¹²

Who Filed and What Happened to Them

Four Texas law firms filed five separate suits on behalf of roughly 20 Ukrainian plaintiffs per case, including 14 people killed and six injured in Russian attacks. Each complaint seeks more than $1 million in damages, and the lead case is captioned Shumylo v. Texas Instruments.³⁴

Among the plaintiffs are three women whose children and a grandchild were killed in Russian strikes, and survivors of the July 8, 2024 missile attack on the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv.⁵ A central incident in the complaints is the April 4, 2025 ballistic missile strike with a cluster warhead on a residential area of Kryvyi Rih, which killed at least 19 people, including 9 children, and injured 72.⁶

What the Lawsuits Allege

The complaints do not accuse the companies of selling chips directly to Russia. The theory is negligence: that the defendants kept compliance systems loose enough to let their products flow through distributors and intermediaries in China, Hong Kong, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, and from there into Russian and Iranian weapons production.⁷ The plaintiffs plead four causes of action under Texas tort law: negligence, negligence per se (grounded in alleged violations of U.S. export-control laws and sanctions), gross negligence, and wrongful death.⁸

The suits group the chipmakers and the distributor together, arguing all four sold through “channels that were known to be vulnerable to diversion.”⁹

Why Mouser, a Distributor, Is a Defendant

Mouser Electronics, based in Mansfield, Texas, is not a chipmaker. It is a component distributor owned by Berkshire Hathaway through its subsidiary TTI, Inc. The complaints allege Mouser “facilitated the sale” of Texas Instruments and Intel semiconductors to Russian-linked entities, and that its “decisions and logistics operations” were a “substantial domestic component” of the misconduct that caused the plaintiffs’ injuries.¹⁰ Mouser’s senior vice president of marketing, Kevin Hess, said the company “deeply respect[s] the legal process and will respond to this matter in court, versus the media.”¹

The Evidence Behind the Claims

The complaints build on several years of outside investigations identifying American components in recovered Russian weapons. A Reuters investigation with the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and the Russian outlet iStories traced parts from Texas Instruments, Intel (through its Altera brand), AMD (through Xilinx), and Analog Devices in cruise missiles, Iskander ballistic missiles, precision-guided rockets, and combat helicopters.¹¹ An August 2022 RUSI review documented 450 foreign components in Russian weapons, 318 of them of U.S. origin, with Texas Instruments and Analog Devices appearing most often.¹²

A 2023 Kyiv School of Economics report, produced with the International Working Group on Russian Sanctions, examined 174 foreign components pulled from Shahed-136/131, Lancet, and Orlan-10 drones; roughly 69% came from U.S.-owned companies, and Texas Instruments accounted for 36.¹³ By 2024, Ukraine’s National Agency for Corruption Prevention had catalogued 2,797 foreign components in Russian weapons, 72% from U.S. manufacturers.¹²

Reuters noted that many of these parts are not specialized military chips. They are “run-of-the-mill” consumer or industrial components, the kind found in microwaves or cars, repurposed by Russian designers for weapons. That ordinariness is part of what makes diversion difficult to police.¹¹

A September 2024 report by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations examined AMD, Analog Devices, Intel, and Texas Instruments and concluded that their export-control compliance was “abjectly lacking.” The report found that none of the four audited all of their distributors yearly, and that exports from the four companies to known transshipment hubs in 2023 were “significantly elevated” over pre-war levels.¹² The plaintiffs lean on these findings heavily, and argue they could not have discovered the alleged conduct before this report was published.

What the Companies Say

All four defendants deny wrongdoing. Intel said it does not conduct business in Russia, suspended all shipments to Russia and Belarus after the invasion, and operates in “strict accordance with export laws, sanctions and regulations.”³ Texas Instruments said it stopped selling into Russia and Belarus in February 2022 and maintains policies against illicit diversion. AMD did not respond to media requests at the time of filing.¹

Where the Cases Stand

On February 18, 2026, the defendants removed the five cases to federal court. The plaintiffs did not oppose the move, and the cases were consolidated before Judge Sidney Fitzwater in the Northern District of Texas.²¹⁴ The defendants then moved to dismiss on five main grounds:

Federal preemption, arguing that state tort claims cannot be used to enforce federal export controls or shape foreign policy, where the country must speak with “one voice.”
Lack of causation under Ashcroft v. Iqbal, because the complaints do not identify which specific chips were in the weapons that caused each plaintiff’s injury.
Statute of limitations.
No private cause of action under federal export-control laws.
No liability for third-party criminal acts, meaning manufacturers should not answer for a foreign government’s military operations.

These positions appear in filings reported by the Texas Lawbook and the Dallas Morning News.¹⁴¹⁵

The plaintiffs answer that the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act expressly preserve state common-law remedies, so Congress did not intend to preempt their claims. On timing, they argue “fraudulent concealment” kept them from discovering the defendants’ alleged conduct before September 2024. They analogize their case to product-liability and opioid rulings in which defendants were held responsible for foreseeable third-party harms.¹⁴

Oral arguments on the motions to dismiss were set for May 19, 2026. On June 11, 2026, Judge Fitzwater granted an unopposed motion to amend, and the plaintiffs filed five amended complaints. The cases remain pending.¹⁶¹⁴

The Lawyers and the Strategy

The plaintiffs’ coalition includes the Watts Law Firm, led by mass-tort attorney Mikal Watts; the national firm BakerHostetler; Aldous Law and San Antonio attorney Jamie Shaw; and the Kyiv-based firm Avellum.⁷ Before filing, Watts and his team spent nine days in Ukraine visiting five attack sites to document U.S.-made semiconductors in weapon remnants.¹⁷

Watts has compared the theory to the opioid litigation he worked on for five years against Purdue Pharmaceuticals and major distributors, which produced recoveries exceeding $58 billion. He called the legal framework “very similar,” pursuing both the manufacturers and the distributors for failing to control where their products went. “If they don’t change their practices, we’re going to stay on them and make it so expensive they’re going to wish they did,” Watts said.¹⁷

1
Axios Dallas. Texas Instruments, Intel Lawsuit Russia Weapons Ukraine
2
Texas Lawbook. TI, Intel, AMD and Mouser Successfully Move Ukrainian Lawsuits to Federal Court
3
Communications Litigation Today. US Firms Sued for Failing to Stop Chips From Being Used in Russian Weapons
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KERA News. Texas Instruments Weapons Missile Drone Attacks Russia Ukraine War Lawsuit
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The Dallas Morning News. Dallas-Based Texas Instruments Among Firms Sued for Supplying Parts for Russian Missiles
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CNN. Ukraine Strike Zelensky Russia
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Aldous Law. Lawsuits Filed Against U.S. Chipmakers for Tech Found in Russian Weapons
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Watts Law Firm. Lawsuit Filed Against Texas Instruments, AMD and Intel
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Watts Law Firm. Ukraine War Cases
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B4Ukraine. Intel, AMD Accused of Allowing Chips in Russian Missiles
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Reuters. Ukraine Crisis Russia Missiles Chips
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U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The U.S. Technology Fueling Russia’s War in Ukraine
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Kyiv School of Economics. Foreign Components in Russian Military Drones
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The Dallas Morning News. Texas Instruments Tech Firms Want Ukraine War Lawsuits Dismissed
15
Texas Lawbook. TI Tech Firms Want Ukrainian Lawsuit Dismissed
16
PACER Monitor. Shumylo et al v. Texas Instruments Incorporated et al
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Euromaidan Press. Intel AMD Texas Instruments Lawsuit Chips Russian Missiles Ukraine