It is not just ammunition, and not just military material.
The ex-China rail data that came out earlier in the month showed that 2022 railfreight volumes out of China were up, but that railfreight volumes from China into Europe were down. Europe has definitely shown a distinct reluctance to use railfreight lines across Russia, so that explains the reduction into Europe. However I don't think the Stans are taking much of that railfreight, so either Russian railfreight imports have gone up, or Iranian ones, or a bit of both. The data wasn't clear on that point (odd, eh) but I suspect quite a lot of materials are flowing from China into Russia. Most likely industrial & agricultural to substitute for stuff that previously came into Black Sea ports or via Europe.
There is also an increase in railfreight flows out of Russia, down through Iran (various routes are involved which are now much-improved), and onto shipping in the port of Bandar Abbas. From there generally to India or Africa. There is a war to be paid for and Black Sea and European ports are closed. Again the data doesn't seem informative on flows in the reverse direction.
I've seen no evidence that China is providing direct military aid to Russia. China makes a lot of the same calibers Russia uses and could be providing ammunition and arms to Russia. There are people examining shell fragments for manufacturing dates and other clues of where ammunition is coming from and it doesn't appear any is coming from China. Russia's petrochemical industry is pretty strong, but their other chemical production is poor. They are probably buying large quantities of ingredients from China which does have a pretty broad chemical industry.
China has probably replaced a lot of the consumer goods that used to come from the west and are now not available.
China is limited in the kinds of industrial machines and electronics it can provide. They do produce some electronic goods, but they don't make the high tech specific purpose ICs Russia needs for some of its weapons. The Russians may have worked out some Chinese work arounds in some areas.
Other than petroleum products Russia does export a lot of raw materials or near raw materials (like pig iron). They haven't been big exporters of manufactured products except for military hardware and I expect the exports of those items have stopped. They are probably trying to find new markets for their ores and partially refined ores now that the west isn't taking any of them. I would not be surprised if that's the bulk of goods flowing out of those ports.
OK, corruption was all the fault of their overlords? We are getting sold a lot of nice stories about Ukraine now. Dealing with corruption and oligarch power was a defining element of doing business in Ukraine. You may want to look at cases like this:
Michael Yurkovich launched a solar power project in Ukraine. The profits were good, the future was bright. Then he started to learn more about the neighbourhood.
www.macleans.ca
To my knowledge it ended with the Canadian investor disassembling his solar energy plant. There is a reason why Ukraine was an economic basket case even before the war, despite its natural riches.
It is not the fault of any overlords. Corruption creeps into a society on all levels. For example contrast the police in the US and Mexico. There are corrupt police in the US who would be willing to take a bribe, but it's highly risky to offer a bribe to a cop in the US unless you already have a good idea they will take it. A blind offer of a bribe is more likely to get you arrested.
In Mexico, it's widely known that many cops are on the take and while there is still a chance you could get arrested for offering a cop a bribe, you are much more likely to get away with it.
In many countries it's pretty much common knowledge that if you want government agents to do anything for you, you need to give them a bribe, but in low corruption you are much more likely to get arrested for trying to bribe an official.
It boils down to the overall cultural tolerance to corruption. It happens in non-governmental areas too. I worked in one company where it was pretty common for people to take home office supplies. Probably half the office supplies were stolen every year. That was the corporate culture. I heard when I worked there that this company was one of the biggest buyers of office supplies in the entire US every year. It was a large company, but not the largest.
Most other companies I've worked for there has been much less of a corporate culture of office supply theft. There probably is a little bit going on, but it's much less than that one company.
Russia took control of the eastern part of Ukraine in the 1600s and the western part about 100 years later. Russia made several attempts to fully Russify Ukraine which only partially succeeded. Eastern Ukraine was settled by ethnic Russians to some extent starting in the 17th century.
Russia always had a certain degree of corruption, but it got much worse in the Soviet era. I recall reading somewhere that Lenin realized the communist revolution had failed before he died. Instead of the dreamed of worker's paradise Russia became even more centralized than under the Tzar with better surveillance of the system thanks to industrialization. Supplies of even basic goods like bread became difficult to come by so a lucrative black market cropped up. People needed to use the black market just to survive so it touched everyone's lives directly.
When official channels for anything were clogged with lazy bureaucrats who had no incentive to get anything done, people found ways around everything.
The USSR became a fundamentally corrupt place top to bottom. Russia and the other former Soviet republics inherited this corruption. One of the reasons the army is in such bad shape today is that corruption is so rampant that most of the money and gear for the army gets stolen.
The places that were under Moscow's thumb the shortest time have had an easier time fighting the corruption, but it's been an uphill fight for most of these countries. Some have done better than others. Hungry is a corrupt mess now, Poland is a bit better, but is not great. The Baltic Republics have probably done the best job of rooting out corrupting of any eastern European countries.
Ukraine is in the process of getting away from the Russian style of corruption. Before the war the government was facing a lot of resistance both inside and outside the country because it's just the way things are for so many people and they can't get their mind around a system that doesn't have petty corruption.
The war has opened the door to rethinking everything. The new memes are corruption is the old Russian way of doing things and being non-corrupt is the European model Ukraine wants to live by. Another way of looking at it is that any form of corruption helps the Russian army, so if the corruption stops, it helps the war effort.
There are still those who are fundamentally more selfish and will still try to steal, but they are more likely to get caught because their neighbors are now less likely to look the other way and the overall mood of the country is becoming less tolerant of it. When only one or two people are stealing they also are more likely to stand out when the forensic accountants look at the books.
The war is a major boost towards a more honest system, but it will take a generation or two to get the corruption down to noise levels. Most countries today with low corruption had periods when corruption was vastly worse than it is today.
Goes much deeper. We have massive problems with infiltration in Germany and funding of alternative parties.
The AfD is circulated to be backed by the Kremlin, heck maybe one day we´ll hear of parts of the SPD our second biggest party being bribed.
In that regard Putin was smart and thought in decades dating back to the Mr. Schroeder era and the aftermath.
Strategic corruption is the term and I would bet the Trump family fell for it, parts of the dems I see in there too.
It's only been over the last decade, but the Russians got good at social influencing countries. They found existing fault lines within cultures and exploited them on social media. In the US 2016 election they were working both sides to sow division. It worked better than they hoped on the right, but it worked on the far left too.
At the same time they had agents on the ground who were playing influence games. For example one angle was to have agents pose as Russian gun's rights activists to lure the American pro-gun people into their fold. They had astroturf organizations for Russian pro-gun rights groups that really didn't exist. Private gun ownership isn't legal in Russia, but they appealed to the gun lovers in the US by making it appear they had kindred spirits in Russia.
They also lured in some far left people by pitching modern Russia as a sort of communism perfected. Third party candidate for president Jill Stein was wined and dined in Moscow by Putin to get her feeling warm and fuzzy about Russia. To her credit it appears she did figure out she had been duped after the election. Many on the right who were duped still haven't figured it out, even when some of the Russian agents were caught and convicted.
Russia played the British during Brexit fanning anti-immigrant feelings in the population, even though Brexit really wasn't about that directly. The immigrants most of the anti-immigrant crowd are most worked up about aren't from Europe, though there was some anti-Polish immigrant sentiment too.
In Germany Russia took a different approach. Germany wanted to do business with Russia in the hopes that economic ties would prevent Russia from doing anything too rash. Russia played Germany along to get all it could economically and materially out of Germany while plotting to stab Germany and Europe in the back.
The parallels between what happened in the lead up to WW II and now are amazing. Hitler played almost the exact same game on Stalin. Ultimately not to Germany's favor.
The Chinese have been playing their own influence games too. It isn't just Russia.
At this point Russia has blown decades of carefully crafted shell games to dupe westerners and western governments. Some are still working. The US still has a pro-Putin component and some of those people are in government. But the war has weakened their control. I'm sure the Russians have had some hooks into some Democrats, but it's been much more obvious with Republican politicians, some of whom were pretty chummy with the Russians before the war.
You are correct however with the periscopic view out of a save island.
We have the freaks around the corner. Italy fell, Austria under scrutiny, Orban in effect et al.
We have a lot on our table.
There are political problems in Europe. Italy is back in the hands of some neo-fascists, but it appears they are still supporting Ukraine for now. Orban is a pain in the side of NATO and the EU.
I don't know how this war is going to end, but Russia is going to come out of it drastically weaker than it was before the war. The markets for their goods have been badly upset, the war is going to leave deep scars on the culture, and many of their foreign influence operations have fallen apart. Russia has also burned up a large part of the stockpile of weapons left behind by the USSR. The army as an institution has been badly damaged and just restoring their training regimes is going to be tough.
Russia's allies in the west are going to suddenly be fairly lonely and they may fall out of power as a result. Hopefully Hungry returns to something sane after Orban. Anti-Russian nationalist parties like Poland has might get stronger though.