ukraine russia tank

A Ukrainian serviceman walks past destroyed Russian tanks not far from the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on April 3, 2022. (SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images)

FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA: Two and a half months after’s Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a clear theme has emerged: the technology Russia brought to the fight was largely outdated or poorly maintained. With thousands of vehicles, helicopters and jets now having been destroyed by Ukrainian forces, one of the greatest questions facing Moscow’s military planners are how to produce or procure new equipment, at a time when sanctions are limiting their ability to procure key parts.

Details show a dim and severely diminished future for Russia’s defense industrial sector. Reports from foreign experts examining Russian hardware abandoned on the field and dissection of long-range missile components still intact after impact by Ukrainian intelligence analysts demonstrates clearly that the weapon systems being used in this war are heavily dependent on inputs from foreign suppliers — the majority of whom are legally barred from doing business with Russia under the current sanctions regime.

That level of dependence likely means Russia’s ability to re-stock the missiles and weapon systems that have been expended in the conflict will be heavily curtailed for the foreseeable future — and, in some cases, effectively impossible.

A previous report by Breaking Defense, published prior to Moscow’s invasion, described how and why the Russian defense industry would not survive in the post-war period. As with many other assessments prior to the Feb 24 initial strikes on Kyiv, Kharkiv and other cities, the report underestimated the ability of Ukraine’s military to track Russian forces and destroy their equipment in large numbers.

There was also an underappreciation of how effective Ukraine’s forces would be in using generations-old military hardware. The success of the aging Ukrainian Air Force (PSU) and its ground-based air defense units against the latest Russian combat aircraft is one example. The success of Kyiv’s ground forces employing previous-generation weapons, such as a 100-year-old machine gun design is another.

RELATED: Russian troops held me captive at gunpoint for two weeks in Ukraine. Here’s what I learned.

But the very real future disadvantage that the Russian military is staring at now is the current sanctions regime. These are a set of embargoes that are several orders of magnitude larger and more comprehensively restrictive than those imposed following the initial invasion and occupation by Moscow of the Crimea and Donbas regions in 2014.

While the latest and most modern Russian long-range systems, like the Kalibr cruise missile and the Iskander-M SRBM, were heavily employed in the early stages of the conflict, US intelligence reports point out that Moscow has recently scaled back the extensive use of these classes of weapons in favor of older-generation analogues. The US and Ukrainian governments, as well as outside experts, all assess that these steps were taken due to the Russian military now running low on modern, precision-guided systems that it can expend on a regular basis.

“We do assess that they are running through their precision-guided missiles at a pretty fast clip,” DoD spokesman John Kirby said May 10. “And we believe that the sanctions are part of this because it’s harder for Mr. Putin to get the kinds of components that make up precision-guided munitions and his defense industrial base is having trouble keeping up with that.”

Even the use of the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal (a Russian word meaning “dagger”) missile, a hypersonic aeroballistic missile that is launched from a specially-modified Mikoyan MiG-31 fighter-interceptor aircraft, can be seen as a sign of weakness, not strength. Russia has claimed its use several times going back to March, but defense officials have downplayed the impact, with US defense secretary Lloyd Austin stating that the March claim of hypersonic use was designed to intimidate the international community more than achieve any military end.

“I would not see it as a game changer,” Austin told CBS then. “I think the reason he [Putin] is resorting to using these types of weapons is because he is trying to reestablish some momentum.”

At this point Moscow faces the real prospect of having to cease using its most effective missile systems in order to ensure that it has enough inventory on hand to maintain a credible and sustainable defensive posture against NATO and its other perceived enemies.

Signs of Dependence on Foreign Components

In March and April, the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) sent some of its specialists to Ukraine to examine what had been discovered about the Russian military in these first two months of the conflict. The materials uncovered included not only the unexploded remains of numerous Russian weapons systems, but also a trove of documents from inside of the Russian government and even some completely intact weapon systems — all left behind by retreating Russian troops.

The institute has since produced a 23-page report that documents the number and variety of foreign components found inside Russian weapon systems, complete with photos and the identification of the original country of origin.

UKRAINE-RUSSIA-CONFLICT

A car passes by the remains of a missile in a residential area after recent shelling in the northern outskirts of Kharkiv, on April 21, 2022. (SERGEY BOBOK/AFP via Getty Images)

Among the report’s findings:

• An examination of Russian systems conducted by the Central Scientific Research Institute for Armaments of the Armed Forces of Ukraine “reveals that there is a consistent pattern across all major Russian weapons systems recovered from the battlefield. The 9M949 guided 300-mm rocket that forms the backbone of Russian precision artillery as a munition for the Tornado-S multiple launch rocket system uses a US-made fibre-optic gyroscope for its inertial navigation. The Russian TOR-M2 air-defence system – one of the most potent short-ranged air-defence systems in the world – relies on a British-designed oscillator in the computer controlling the platform’s radar. This pattern is true in the Iskander-M, the Kalibr cruise missile, the Kh-101 air-launched cruise missile,” as well as many others.

• “An examination by the technical labs of the Ukrainian intelligence community of the Aqueduct family of Russian military radios (R-168-5UN-2, R-168-5UN-1 and R-168-5UT-2), which form the backbone of the Russian military’s tactical communications, for instance, reveals critical electronic components manufactured in the US, Germany, the Netherlands, South Korea and Japan. The pattern is universal. Almost all of Russia’s modern military hardware is dependent upon complex electronics imported from the US, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, Israel, China and further afield.”

• The 9M727 cruise missile that is fired from the Iskander-K is seen as “an example of one of Russia’s most advanced weapons systems, able to manoeuvre at low altitude to a target and strike with considerable precision.” This missile must be fitted with an on-board computer “able to ingest data from various inertial and active sensors and command links and translate these into instructions to manipulate the missile’s control surfaces.” Inspection of one of these computers recovered from a crashed 9M727showed it to be “roughly the size of an A4 sheet of paper and sits inside a heat shield able to withstand the pressure as the missile accelerates and the heat that engulfs the system.”

“The computer must be remarkably robust, its components able to continue to function even as the structure around it is warped by temperature changes. This requires highly specialised materials and components. Of the seven socket attachment points allowing data to be moved through the heat shield, one is of Soviet-era design and manufactured in Russia. The remaining six are all products of US companies. The rails connecting the circuit boards to the computer housing, which must maintain the alignment of the components under immense forces, are similarly of US manufacture. The circuit boards themselves are sourced from the US.”

These assessments are echoed by senior Ukraine weapons designers who spoke to Breaking Defense.

“The Kalibr missiles designed by Novator have around 70 percent foreign content in the seeker and other associated elements of the guidance system,” said the director of one Ukraine’s largest missile system design centers. “They have now fired off almost all of the units that they could afford to expend on targets in Ukraine. So, not all the import substitution in the world will permit the Russians to re-start this production line with their own home-grown components anytime soon — most likely never.”

Miscalculations and Inadequate Sanctions Enforcement

The after-action assessment is that Russia’s senior military leadership disregarded the issue of foreign content not being available in the future to fit to their advanced weapon system in making its invasion plans. This was due to their assumption that the war was supposed to be over in a matter of days and they anticipated utilizing only a small portion of their available arsenal.

But within the upper ranks of the Russian Government, there are signs that the coming shortage of available foreign components has been a matter of concern for two months now.

In March the Russian presidential administration stood up an interdepartmental committee to assess the supply chain vulnerabilities in Russian defense equipment and to develop plans to produce some components that can no longer be imported domestically — or to acquire the others from “friendly” countries. For the RUSI report, friendly nations are defined here as “those not compliant with or less vigilant in enforcing US sanctions.”

Kyiv Finds ‘New Normal’ As Russia Focuses Attack On East And South

A man passes a destroyed Russian armoured vehicle which is part of a display of Russian military hardware that has been put on the street for public viewing in central Kyiv on May 17, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

In addition, the same committee has taken steps to procure specific systems through illegal and covert means — much like the old Soviet State Committee for Science and Technology (GKNT) was responsible for during the Cold War. This committee will be headed by Deputy Russian Defence Minister Aleksei Krivoruchko. As the report notes, “the Russian Special Services (the euphemism used to describe the successor agencies to the Soviet-era KGB) are thus scrambling to rebuild covert supply chains [from the Cold War period] to continue to obtain critical components for Russia’s defence industries.”

At the same time, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Denis Manturov, the Minister for Trade and Industry that oversees the defense sector, signed off on new regulations that expedite the clearance and certification of imported materials for defense production. Then, on March 30, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin announced that Moscow would take a page from their PRC partners and would now permit items to be imported into Russia without the permission of the owner of the relevant intellectual property.

Perhaps not coincidentally, these changes have been accompanied by an uptick in Russian requests for PRC-sourced military equipment. Ammunition, which Russian troops have been running low on in some areas, and microelectronic components needed to supplant systems formerly acquired from the West are at the top of Moscow’s wish list.

Plugging Loopholes: Mission Impossible?

Since the beginning of this century the trend of weapon systems being built using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components instead of those produced by a captive defense electronics industry has accelerated rapidly. This makes the task of denying Russian industry access to military-grade computer chips and other items far more difficult than in previous decades.

The same RUSI report acknowledges this by pointing out that “In some instances these components are civilian dual-use electronics that can be procured commercially.”

RELATED: Russia’s New SU-75 Checkmate Promises A Lot. Can It Deliver?

But the report’s authors then go on to add that in a large number of instances of their discovering Western-made content in Russian weapons platforms, the components in question are “pieces of military or specialized technologies for which there are a small number of regulated suppliers.”

In plain English, this means that these items have been purchased and/or shipped to Russia illegally, as their importation was already barred years ago by the sanctions regime imposed on Moscow post-2014. A more restrictive export control regime can be instituted by the US and its allies, but the report points out that it is always possible for Russia to obtain these items by “laundering” them through front-companies in third-party nations. The Czech Republic, Serbia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, India, and the PRC are identified by the RUSI report as the most likely candidates, with Ukranian sources pointing to the UAE as another option.

However, there remain nations even within the EU willing to skirt export control restrictions in order to make sales to Russian industry. Classified documents obtained by the investigative reporting site Disclose and published in mid-March reveal that between 2015 and 2020 France had been secretly arming Russia. At the same time French president Emmanuel Macron had been at the forefront to finding a diplomatic solution to prevent an invasion of Ukraine by Russia, France had already issued 76 export licenses for sale to Russia of military equipment worth a total of €152 million ($158 million).

Disclose determined that the “French aerospace and defence companies Thales and Safran, in which the French state has major stakes, were the main beneficiaries of these contracts. The deals mostly involve thermal image cameras for tanks, and navigation systems and infrared detectors for Russian fighters and attack helicopters.”

There seems very little doubt that Russia needs substantial inputs of foreign technology or its defense industrial sector will collapse. By way of example, the RUSI report included comments from the Institute of Radio-Engineering and Electronics within the Russian Academy of Sciences recently conducted an analysis of the communications architectures in Russian military vehicles, which included the Ilyushin Il-76 military transport aircraft.

This aircraft’s design dates back to the 1970s and is the workhorse of the Russian military’s heavy airlift capacity. But the institute discovered that within this aircraft’s communications suite there are some 80 components that cannot be replaced with microchips, circuit boards or other technologies manufactured in Russia.

However, there is reason to have skepticism that a truly crippling sanctions regime can be maintained against Moscow indefinitely, given the financial and commercial impact on the rest of the world, especially the energy sector.

“There are too many investments — particularly by the French and the Germans — as well all others for those adversely affected by these embargoes — to not look for any and all means to circumvent them,” said one long-time Pentagon analyst of Russia’s military. “I do not know if these sanctions can be maintained for ten years. I would be surprised if they last six years at the outside.”

This makes the battle for Ukraine and the long-term goal of keeping Russia and NATO from coming into direct contact with one another a two-dimensional conflict. One is what takes place on the battlefield. The uneasy standoff can be maintained as long as the US and others continue to supply Ukraine with the NLAWs, the Javelin and Stinger missile systems that have given such a boost to the Ukrainian armed forces.

But the other dimension is the murky world of illegal technology transfers, phony front companies and the myriad of mechanisms that Russia can employ to defeat the West’s attempts to cripple its defense sector. Agents from US Homeland Security Investigations state that Russian circumvention of US export controls on military and other sensitive technology are increasing markedly. A special unit of 25 US counter-proliferation analysts trained to flag and investigate suspicious shipments, previously focused on China, have now shifted their focus towards Russia, to prevent these illegal shipments.

If the sanctions regime that now prohibits Russia from accessing the technologies is going to have any teeth whatsoever, it may well require a substantial overhaul of the enforcement measures designed to maintain its effectiveness.