In this thread people otherwise very knowledgeable are failing tomunderstand how porous sanctions have been. The A330 going to Iran is an example. Parts from Dubai, Kuwait and Bahrain can and do go to Iran, as can aircraft technicians. We shouldA quote I saw recently:
"Russia is never as strong as she looks; Russia is never as weak as she looks." (Attributed to multiple individuals, including Winston Churchill.)
Another thing I saw was from a German officer in Operation Barbarosa in 1941. He said that Russian artillery is either awful and can't hit anything, or it's deadly accurate and nothing in between.
Russian quality ranges all over the map from abysmal to quite good and is often bifurcated with a little bit of very high quality and a sea of terrible.
In some areas the Russians are adapting. They are getting more drones over the battlefields now and finally figuring out how to use them like the Ukrainians. I saw a report a couple of days ago that a Russian was saying he could finally get drones easily for his unit. They apparently bought a large number of them from China.
Russia has also started employing aerial dropped smart bombs again after being absent from the battlefield for a year.
But the Russians can't get around a number of problems stemming from sanctions as well as bad decisions last year. One of their "own goals" was to strip their training units and send those people to Ukraine where a lot of them have gotten killed and the ones who are still alive are probably not coming back anytime soon because they need all the experienced people they can get on the front.
Because the trainers are now in combat and not training, they have nobody to train new recruits. They were sending some mobiks to Belarus to train under Belorussian trainers, but Belarus only has a relative handful of trainers. Their army is tiny compared to Russia.
Russia also is showing signs of running low on a lot of war material. they are employing vehicles from the 50s and even some WW II era equipment. They are able to equip some elite units up to the normal order of battle, but a lot of units are getting table scraps for equipment. This is a drastic downturn from early in the war when all the units had a full complement of equipment.
They are making progress in Bakhmut now, but they had to deploy their well equipped units to do it. As a result these units are not going to be as full strength and possibly not in position when the Ukrainian offensive starts. Russia's supply of well equipped units is a very limited resource. Those units were probably intended to be the mobile reserve during the Ukrainian offensive to stop breakthroughs and they could have blunted Ukrainian breakthroughs (at least slowed them down to a point of potentially stalling out the offensive), but they won't be at full strength anymore.
If the Ukrainians had been given the western equipment they are getting now last summer, they probably could have rolled up the Russians before last fall and this war would be over. Ukraine has built up their forces over the winter as well as done more training. But the Russians have been able to regroup and rebuild to some extent too. They wasted a lot of that on the stupid offensives, but they still built up some.
Russia has also been able to build up defenses. A lot of their defenses are laughably bad, but I'm sure there are some that the Ukrainians will have to put some effort into breaching. If the Ukrainians can get momentum from their breakthrough they may be able to blow through rear area defensive lines before the Russians can man them, but they need to move fast to do that. Speed will be the key.
The Russians are able to get parts via the black market, but the sanctions make it much tougher and there are entire systems they need and can't get. The best machine tools for making some military equipment come from the west. Without access to those the Russians can't expand production and production may fall as the old equipment wears out and they can't get it repaired.
Similar problems will plague their oil industry. Russia has relied on foreign experts for a lot of the more complex jobs in their oil business. Going back to the Soviet days they were always weak in the geo professional areas. My sister was a Petroleum Geologist and her company had a contract back in the 90s to help revamp the Russian oil business. A lot of American and other western companies were working with the Russians to rebuild their oil business after decades of mismanagement under the Soviets.
She said their fields were a complete mess and over the decade the western companies turned around their business. Rather than train their own Geologists and engineers to manage their fields, the Russians continued to outsource the jobs. Now those people have left the country and they have few professionals to keep everything moving smoothly. Additionally equipment breaks down and they will see problems as their equipment breaks and can't be repaired.
They can get some things and probably some expertise from other countries who are still talking to Russia, but those countries don't have large pools of professionals they can draw from like the western countries, and they don't always have the parts Russia needs.
One area where this is becoming a crisis is in commercial aviation. They are flying some of their Airbus jets to Iran for maintenance, but Iran has very few qualified technicians so progress on any maintenance is slow. They have gotten around the mandatory maintenance by allowing their airliners to fly twice the miles mandated by western air authorities before maintenance. They still have half their commercial airliner fleet grounded for lack of spare parts.
Some of the parts that Russia needs are so common they can get them on the gray market quite easily. For example they have started using smart bombs again from their aircraft. They were completely out of them at the start of the war and it took until now to get them back into production. The bombs probably used some parts that were difficult to get under sanctions, but they redesigned them to use off the shelf parts like Chinese GPS modules with low tech processors and Chinese servo systems (for controlling the fins) that use some ancient processor that is off patent. The fact they were completely missing for almost a year and they are suddenly appearing in decent numbers is an indication they needed to retool manufacturing and it's working again.
Russia is adapting, but the sanctions are also biting them hard too. The longer the sanctions are on, the more difficult it's going to get for Russia to keep this up. In some areas they will successfully adapt and get needed hardware back into production, but other areas they are going to struggle badly to get much made.
It's a woman and the article calls her an officer, but she was enlisted. From another story I thought they said she was actively serving at Bremerton, WA when she started this activity, but she recently got out with an honorable discharge.
Just possessing the material is a crime, though one that usually results in a slap of the wrist if the person doesn't do anything with it. The fact she was disseminating it moves into espionage act territory. She's probably looking at a decade or more, possible court martial, and her separation changed from honorable to dishonorable discharge.
not be naive about such issues. The sanctions hurt, not as much as does the exodus of gualified people. The narrative that there is such desperation when most of Africa, South America and much if the Middle East and Indian Subcontinent are quite willing rodela in grey areas. The entrepôt activities in most of those countries have developed over centuries and have not stopped. Barter still works.
