Western exports of key microchips and electronics that Russia needs to fuel its war machine are back to pre-invasion levels, as Moscow has ramped up efforts to circumvent sanctions, a top official said Wednesday.

“By the start of this year, Russia was able to reimport certain key categories of electronics at about pre-war levels,” Jim O’Brien, sanctions coordinator at the U.S. State Department, told POLITICO's Brussels Playbook at an ECFR event in Stockholm, referring to chips, processors and integrated circuits key to making modern weapons.

The problem, O’Brien said, is that European companies are selling to other countries, which in turn resell the materials to Russia.

The eurozone confounded previous forecasts and shrank for two consecutive quarters, figures on Thursday showed, as energy shocks, Russia's war in Ukraine, inflation, and monetary tightening gnawed at growth momentum over the winter.

Data showed the 20-nation currency area wasn't able to dodge a recession — albeit a very shallow one for now — making politicians' sense of optimism about the eurozone’s economic resilience to such challenges look premature.

GDP shrank by 0.1 percent over the first three months of 2023, according to the revised data from Eurostat, the EU's statistics office. The news was made worse by its revision of the last quarter of 2022 — to a contraction of 0.1 percent, having previously forecast 0 percent. A recession is defined as two successive quarters of contraction

Poland could have been used as an operating base to carry out the attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines last year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing findings of a Germany-led investigation.

German investigators are examining why the yacht believed to have been used to carry out the sabotage deviated into Polish waters, according to the report. The investigators have been able to reconstruct the two-week journey of the the boat — the Andromeda — during the operation, the newspaper said.

The investigators established that the yacht had entered Polish waters by looking into the Andromeda’s radio and navigation equipment, satellite and mobile phones, as well as Gmail accounts, the WSJ saidThe report comes after the Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Western intelligence agencies were aware of a Ukraine-backed plan to damage the Nord Stream pipelines three months before the blasts took place. The allegations were promptly dismissed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an interview with Bild and POLITICO Europe, both of which belong to the Axel Springer group.

“I didn’t know anything, 100 percent,” Zelenskyy said. “I said, 'Show us proof. If our military is supposed to have done this, show us proof.'”

The Kremlin, meanwhile, said the Washington Post report raised suspicion of "an Anglo-Saxon involvement" in the pipeline blasts.

The sabotage of the Nord Stream links, which were designed to carry as much as 110 billion cubic meters of gas a year from Russia to Germany, took place in September 2022, just five months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The German investigators also came to the conclusion that the substance used in the act of sabotage was HMX, an explosive typically used for disrupting subsea infrastructure, according to Saturday's Wall Street Journal report.

The blasts occurred in the economic zones of Sweden and Denmark, which prompted separate investigations by Sweden, Denmark and Germany. So far, however, countries had struggled to identify who was behind the attack.