IF Russia has been under the unprecedentedly wide sanctions for almost two years
BUT It has increased its output of missiles
THEN The sanctions have been targeted wrong all along
Now that is because the policy makers have limited understanding of how the war economy works
The astonishing inefficiency in undermining the Russian military production makes more sense, considering that the sanctions have not been based on any serious understanding of the Russian military manufacturing base, of its rationales and tradeoffs, bottlenecks and chokepoints
To target the military production, you first need to identify its bottlenecks. And to identify the bottlenecks you must understand how the production chain works, both in theory and in practice. Now the latter requires a serious OSINT investigation
And that is what we did
We have investigated:
· 4 missiles producing corporations
· 28 key production facilities
· A broad range of sources varying from the official TV propaganda to the PhD dissertations by the military industrial executives
What we found:
CNC Machines: EMCO 🇦🇹, Haas 🇺🇸, Kovosvit Mas 🇨🇿, DMG MORI 🇩🇪, Hermle 🇩🇪, GF🇨🇭, Tos Varnsdorf 🇨🇿, Skoda 🇨🇿, Hyundai 🇰🇷, Walter 🇩🇪, Schaublin🇨🇭, Index 🇩🇪, Parpas 🇮🇹, Hardinge 🇺🇸, Fanuc 🇯🇵, TDZ Turn 🇨🇿, Leadwell 🇹🇼, VDF Boehringer 🇩🇪, Doosan 🇰🇷, Heller 🇩🇪, Mazak 🇯🇵, Okuma 🇯🇵, Kitamura 🇯🇵, Hanwha 🇰🇷, Trumpf 🇩🇪, Biglia 🇮🇹, NSH 🇺🇸, Spinner 🇩🇪, Prima 🇮🇹, Anca 🇦🇺, Techni Waterjet 🇦🇺, LVD 🇧🇪, Mazak 🇯🇵, Stan 🇷🇺, DMTG 🇨🇳 + minor producers, mostly Western European & Taiwanese
NB: Siemens is the only company in the world capable of providing the all-in-one CAD to CNC solution of the military tier, minimising the human factor at any stage of the production process
If I were to name one critical bottleneck in the Russian military manufacturing, I would choose Siemens Teamcenter. The most sophisticated enterprises in Russia including aircraft/aircraft engine/missile producers developed the overreliance on the foolproof Siemens solutions
Resurrected from the ashes of the 1990s, they had neither the Soviet craftsmanship, nor tacit knowledge, nor vocational training system. To compensate for the uneven (low) quality of their workforce and reduce variance in product they had no choice but to overrely on Siemens
The pdf version of our report is already available upon request. It will be soon available for the general audience.
If you want to support our work, you can donate to:
Beneficiary Rhodus Inc.
Account Number 9801141480
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Beneficiary Address 447 Broadway, 2nd Floor, 197 New York, NY 10013
ABA Routing Number 084106768
Bank Name Evolve Bank & Trust
Bank Address 6000 Poplar Ave, Suite 300 Memphis, TN 38119
ETH 0xA9FA4454cC3EC0Ff521926BB5F8D4389bA0e665a
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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.
The single most important thing to understand regarding the background of Napoleon Bonaparte, is that he was born in the Mediterranean. And the Mediterranean, in the words of Braudel, is a sea ringed round by mountains
We like to slice the space horizontally, in our imagination. But what we also need to do is to slice it vertically. Until very recently, projection of power (of culture, of institutions) up had been incomparably more difficult than in literally any horizontal direction.
Mountains were harsh, impenetrable. They formed a sort of “internal Siberia” in this mild region. Just a few miles away, in the coastal lowland, you had olives and vineyards. Up in the highland, you could have blizzards, and many feet of snow blocking connections with the world.
Slavonic = "Russian" religious space used to be really weird until the 16-17th cc. I mean, weird from the Western, Latin standpoint. It was not until second half of the 16th c., when the Jesuit-educated Orthodox monks from Poland-Lithuania started to rationalise & systematise it based on the Latin (Jesuit, mostly) model
One could frame the modern, rationalised Orthodoxy as a response to the Counterreformation. Because it was. The Latin world advanced, Slavonic world retreated. So, in a fuzzy borderland zone roughly encompassing what is now Ukraine-Belarus-Lithuania, the Catholic-educated Orthodox monks re-worked Orthodox institutions modeling them after the Catholic ones
By the mid-17th c. this new, Latin modeled Orthodox culture had already trickled to Muscovy. And, after the annexation of the Left Bank Ukraine in 1654, it all turned into a flood. Eventually, the Muscovite state accepted the new, Latinised Orthodoxy as the established creed, and extirpated the previous faith & the previous culture
1. This book (“What is to be done?”) has been wildly, influential in late 19-20th century Russia. It was a Gospel of the Russian revolutionary left. 2. Chinese Communists succeeded the tradition of the Russian revolutionary left, or at the very least were strongly affected by it.
3. As a red prince, Xi Jinping has apparently been well instructed in the underlying tradition of the revolutionary left and, very plausibly, studied its seminal works. 4. In this context, him having read and studied the revolutionary left gospel makes perfect sense
5. Now the thing is. The central, seminal work of the Russian revolutionary left, the book highly valued by Chairman Xi *does* count as unreadable in modern Russia, having lost its appeal and popularity long, long, long ago. 6. In modern Russia, it is seen as old fashioned and irrelevant. Something out of museum