On a sunny spring day of 2022 someone transferred me 10 Ethereums. That was a lot of money. With this money I could do something big
So, I decided to do something interesting 🧵
Not long before that, I wandered into an article «Germany and Czechia help Russia to build ballistic missiles Sarmat and Sineva with the nuclear warheads» (2017). A case study on the Krasmash missile producing plant, it posed some questions that analysts seldom ask:
🤔
What was the article about?
The Krasnoyarsk Machine Building Plant (Krasmash) is one of two key intercontinental ballistic missile manufacturers in Russia. Krasmash produces and maintains the liquid-propellant missiles such as the ICBM Sarmat and SLBM Bulava
In 2016, a Krasnoyarsk regional TV channel "Yenisei" broadcasted a program on the modernization of Krasmash
It had some interesting visuals.
That was a VLC 4000 ATC + C1 vertical lathe produced by a Czech company TDZ Turn
That was surprisingly easy to track. Back then, TDZ Turn listed a Krasnoyarsk-based company KR Prom (КР Пром) as their official distributor in Russia
TDZ Turn -> KR Prom -> Krasmash
*there is more documental evidence available
What did I learn from this article?
1. The most highly classified & strategically important military producers in Russia operate with Western machine tools
2. I can investigate this based on the most mundane publicly available sources
3. And track the entire supply chain
What did I *not* learn from this article?
1. How import dependent is the Russian military industry?
2. Who is it import dependent upon?
3. Why?
As I could not find the answers in literature, I had to produce them myself. If I do not have a credible picture of how Russia produces weaponry, I will construct it bit by a bit. As I cannot do it alone, I will build a team
And that's how the @rhodusinc was born
@rhodusinc One year later, we have...
@rhodusinc Some of our materials will be posted on our @Rhodusinc Twitter page. This is a short thread with selected visuals on a Russian strategic missiles producer - the Votkinsk Plant
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Fake jobs are completely normal & totally natural. The reason is: nobody understands what is happening and most certainly does not understand why. Like people, including the upper management have some idea of what is happening in an organisation, and this idea is usually wrong.
As they do not know and cannot know causal relations between the input and output, they just try to increase some sort of input, in a hope for a better output, but they do not really know which input to increase.
Insiders with deep & specific knowledge, on the other hand, may have a more clear & definite idea of what is happening, and even certain, non zero degree of understanding of causal links between the input and output
I have recently read someone comparing Trump’s tariffs with collectivisation in the USSR. I think it is an interesting comparison. I don’t think it is exactly the same thing of course. But I indeed think that Stalin’s collectivisation offers an interesting metaphor, a perspective to think about
But let’s make a crash intro first
1. The thing you need to understand about the 1920s USSR is that it was an oligarchic regime. It was not strictly speaking, an autocracy. It was a power of few grandees, of the roughly equal rank.
2. Although Joseph Stalin established himself as the single most influential grandee by 1925, that did not make him a dictator. He was simply the most important guy out there. Otherwise, he was just one of a few. He was not yet the God Emperor he would become later.
The great delusion about popular revolts is that they are provoked by bad conditions of life, and burst out when they exacerbate. Nothing can be further from truth. For the most part, popular revolts do not happen when things get worse. They occur when things turn for the better
This may sound paradoxical and yet, may be easy to explain. When the things had been really, really, really bad, the masses were too weak, to scared and too depressed to even think of raising their head. If they beared any grudges and grievances, they beared them in silence.
When things turn for the better, that is when the people see a chance to restore their pride and agency, and to take revenge for all the past grudges, and all the past fear. As a result, a turn for the better not so much pacifies the population as emboldens and radicalises it.
The first thing to understand about the Russian-Ukrainian war is that Russia did not plan a war. And it, most certainly, did not plan the protracted hostilities of the kind we are seeing today
This entire war is the regime change gone wrong.
Russia did not want a protracted war (no one does). It wanted to replace the government in Kyiv, put Ukraine under control and closely integrate it with Russia
(Operation Danube style)
One thing to understand is that Russia viewed Ukraine as a considerable asset. From the Russian perspective, it was a large and populous country populated by what was (again, from the Russian perspective) effectively the same people. Assimilatable, integratable, recruitable
In 1991, Moscow faced two disobedient ethnic republics: Chechnya and Tatarstan. Both were the Muslim majority autonomies that refused to sign the Federation Treaty (1992), insisting on full sovereignty. In both cases, Moscow was determined to quell them.
Still, the final outcome could not be more different. Chechnya was invaded, its towns razed to the ground, its leader assassinated. Tatarstan, on the other hand, managed to sign a favourable agreement with Moscow that lasted until Putin’s era.
The question is - why.
Retrospectively, this course of events (obliterate Chechnya, negotiate with Tatarstan) may seem predetermined. But it was not considered as such back then. For many, including many of Yeltsin’s own partisans it came as a surprise, or perhaps even as a betrayal.