Tanks, trains, sanctions and other russian problems

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Apparently, the good Colonel has pleaded not guilty to the charges, but whether it is he who is guilty, or maybe someone else, the fact is that someone is responsible, and seven tanks are out of the war until some replacement engines can be manufactured or obtained somehow.

Such are the trials and tribulations of the Red Army. They are in a difficult fight against a determined Ukrainian enemy, and they have not had too many successes of late. In these circumstances their Commander could well have done without one of his subordinates selling off vital kit. And this problem has been made more acute by the heavy losses among those tanks which did manage to enter the battlefield in one piece.

Western analysts have estimated that in the fourteen months of war so far, Russia has lost nearly 2,000 tanks, which had led them to use the likes of previously mothballed T-62 tanks as battlefield replacements. Except that they are not really replacements at all, because they were last manufactured in the 1970s and they do not carry any of the more modern technology which is normally found in the T-90. Efforts have been made to upgrade them by strapping on Explosive Reaction Armour, to take one example, but it is far from clear how much of an effective upgrade this really represents.

So, the best replacement for a destroyed T-90 tank would be a brand-new T-90 tank from the factory in Chelyabinsk. Except that now, even this appears to be a major challenge to those in charge of the factory. Because of Western sanctions it turns out that several vital components are no longer available to Russian manufacturers, and this has proven to be a major drawback for many of the industries attempting to provide material for the war.

For example, one of the main but less obvious components of all types of machinery is the humble ball bearing. No machine can run without them, no tank, no lorry, and no railway train. And the best quality ball bearings come from the West. The Russians themselves acknowledged this when they made Western-manufactured ball bearings a key component of the T-90 tank at the design stage. And in 2020, for instance, Russia imported over $419 million worth of ball bearings, around 55 percent of which originated in Europe and North America.

As a result of the sanctions which began to apply soon after the Russians invaded Ukraine, Russian manufacturers have been desperately short of these ball bearings ever since. Tanks and other modern armoured vehicles need a lot of them because they have a lot of precision moving parts. As a result, these days Russia doesn’t have enough of them to maintain the steady production of new vehicles.

This has had a big effect, not only on the war effort, but also on the whole Russian economy which is dependent on trains for transportation. Trains also need a lot of ball bearings. And so, it has been the case that the Russians have had to make a difficult choice. They could either build more tanks and let the rail system fall into disrepair, or they could keep the trains moving while slowing down the production of those T-90s. From time to time, the media will show one of the Russian leaders, such as Defence Minister Shoigu or maybe even Putin himself, touring a weapons factory and giving a speech encouraging workers to increase production and move onto a war footing. All well and good, but what are those factory workers supposed to do if Russia’s own factories cannot come up with a decent ball bearing?

As of March 2023, the authorities are claiming that they have been able to replace the missing ball bearing production by importing the required technology from what they call “friendly countries” like China and Uzbekistan. That is as maybe, but there is little chance of either of these “friendly countries” being able to provide ball bearings of the quality of major Swedish manufacturer SKF, for example. They might be good enough for a tank which in current conditions will probably have a short lifespan on the Ukrainian battlefield anyway, but will they be good enough to operate efficiently on the long extensive Russian rail system where an average journey can mean travelling for thousands of kilometres.

Another problem for the T-90 manufacturers is caused by the fact that another key component is no longer readily available either. A new T-90 tank requires modern optics, and those optics were normally imported from France. When Paris tightened its sanctions, it deprived Russian industry of the various components it needs for the new tanks’ Sosna-U digital sights. Apparently the Kremlin has compensated for a shortage of these Sosna-U sights by swapping in locally made analog 1PN96MT-02 sights that, while not as precise as Sosna-Us, are at least supposed to give a Russian tank crew a chance in a direct fight with Ukrainian crews.

However, for how long will this remain true? Time does not stand still, especially in a fast-evolving military conflict. It might have been the case that the Russians would have a chance when Ukraine was still using the old Soviet T-72 and T-64 models, But I wonder about what will happen when Ukraine begins to use Leopard tanks obtained from Germany and Challenger tanks from the United Kingdom. In those cases, lacking those few extra degrees of optical precision on their aiming mechanism may become critical. Any mechanical device is only ever as strong as its weakest part, and in essence, even though the Russian tank crews will appear to be using T-90s, they will be operating a version which is bereft of some of its main advanced features.

Another area in which sanctions have hit the production of Russian armaments is the area of semiconductors. In brief, a semiconductor is typically a solid chemical element or compound that conducts electricity under certain conditions but not others. This makes it an ideal medium to control the electrical current found in everyday electrical appliances. This is standard physics, of course, but the genius of the modern semiconductor is that certain manufacturers have been able to make them so small that they can easily be used in the circuitry of tanks and drones, and even in guided missiles and aircraft.

Unfortunately for the Russians, the main sources of the most advanced semiconductors are all located in the West, in the United States and Taiwan in particular. So, Russia has had to find other sources of semiconductors. In some cases, the Russians have not even bothered to obtain any semiconductors themselves but have gone straight out and bought drones and missiles off the shelf from countries such as Iran.

In other cases, they have used third party intermediaries in countries such as Turkey which has not enacted any sanctions against Russia. The intermediary is basically a sanctions buster. He orders the semiconductors from the West and has them delivered to an address in Istanbul, for example. And then he sends them on to Russia. Many people know about this, but according to the media, no one has yet clamped down on it.

But the most ingenious way around the sanctions would appear to come from the fact that many domestic white-goods appliances contain semiconductors as part of their circuitry. As a result, the last year has seen a much larger than usual export of these appliances to countries near to Russia, such as Turkey (again), Armenia, Kazakhstan and others in what Russia likes to call its “near-abroad.” Once in these “near-abroad” countries, the trail of these bulky appliances tends to disappear and there is a strong suspicion that the circuitry of the dishwasher or the refrigerator is eventually finding its way into Russian weapons such as missiles, for example.

This is hard to prove since there is usually not much of the missile left once it has been fired and hit its target. But how else can anyone explain the fact that Armenia imported more washing machines during the first eight months of 2022 than it did during the previous two years combined. And in a similar period, Kazakhstan imported European freezers worth $21.4 million, which is more than three times the amount it imported during the same period the previous year.

What all of this is pointing to is that desperate times have led to equally desperate measures. Warfare these days is not a simple case of one country’s armed forces fighting another country’s armed forces. In fact, it has not been so since the days of the First World War. Nowadays it is a matter of one side’s economic might and industrial production versus another side’s economic might and industrial production.

To be sure, Ukraine’s industrial production has been almost destroyed by the war, but it has access to all sorts of arms from those many countries which are supporting it. Russia on the other hand, although it has a largely intact industrial capacity, this is being rendered increasingly ineffective by various rounds of sanctions initiated by the European Union, the United States, and the United Nations. And as we have seen, these are posing difficulties which are proving difficult to overcome when it comes to obtaining vital precision components.

Other problems facing Russia are the loss of key industrial and technical workers. Some have been lost to the September 2022 mobilisation, with young men being simply scooped up off the streets and sent to the army. Others have been lost to young men avoiding that same mobilization and who have taken the opportunity to flee to places like Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey.

The result of all this would appear to be a decline in the Russian economy’s industrial sector, and this is borne out by an interesting set of air pollution statistics which have been reported by Business Insider. These statistics show that air pollution in Russia’s industrial regions fell 1.2% in the six months to April 2023, and is 6.2% lower annually. These data come from a bird’s eye view on Russia, courtesy of Tropospheric Monitoring Instruments, which are operated by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satellite, and which detect gases like nitrogen dioxide, ozone, methane, and others.

Comparing measurements, they show that the volume of air pollutants emitted by the country’s factories has declined. This is good for the environment and will help the problems of climate change, but it is something which Russia can ill afford if they are to keep pace industrially with Ukraine on the battlefield. We might note in passing that the Russian government claims that its industrial production is on the increase. However, this claim would appear to fly in the face of the available evidence.

From what we have seen so far, Russia could keep mobilising more and more men to keep fighting her war with Ukraine. That is, if those men agree to keep reporting for duty. However, that will not be enough. What will probably see the end of the Russian war effort will be its inability to keep up industrial production in what is more and more an industrial and economic war.

Years of corruption and a lack of suitable private investment have meant that Russian industry is not sufficiently capable of supplying a war economy in the long term. This did not matter in a time before sanctions, because Russia would simply import what it needed. Lenin used to talk about the West being full of “useful idiots” who would give the Soviet Union what it needed to beat them. In similar vein, the Russia of the Putin era would use Western technology to improve and build up its weaponry. Until sanctions meant that they could no longer do so.

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