That's good news. If all the landing ships are taken out before the Kerch Bridge is that will create an immediate crisis when the Kerch Bridge is out. I'm sure Ukraine is working on a plan to take out the bridge, but Russia has upped its defenses of the bridge and it's going to take a lot to take out the bridge. If Ukraine wants to disable the bridge for a long time, they need to damage some of the supports enough that they need to be replaced. If the supports are good, the bridge deck and be replaced fairly easily.
I expect Ukraine is working on some submarine drones to take out bridge supports below the waterline.
Their navy yes. Their airforce though I think is building planes faster than they're losing them unfortunately.
Aircraft production is a big unknown. In 2022 they were able to complete a number of Su-34s, but the avionics for those aircraft were probably acquired pre-war. We don't know what they have now as far as avionics stocks.
But the best estimates for aircraft deliveries are in the neighborhood of 18 aircraft in 2023
russia Got Eighteen New Combat Jets in 2023, Not to Mention Su-57 | Defense Express
The Kremlin is claiming more than 100 aircraft delivered.
I didn't watch the entire video, but he made a lot of guesses and he was basing his loss numbers on Orynx which only counts losses with visual evidence. A large number of Russian air losses in the last year have been behind Russian lines, so they haven't been counted. The Ukrainians claim 347 Russian aircraft lost in combat. A larger number have been lost to fatigue.
Ka-52s have essentially disappeared from the battlefield. The Ukrainians destroyed quite a few, but a lot were lost to just wear and tear too. There are pictures from Russian bases showing many Ka-52s that have been pirated for parts and will likely never fly again. A lot have the rotors removed. That is a heavy wear part Russian industry is not producing in large enough numbers so they stripped them off some airframes to keep others flying. And then the ones they kept flying got shot down.
The Russians probably had a number of avionics sets built for new aircraft before the war. That would be a long lead item component that would probably be put together months if not a year before final production. That enabled the Russians to keep the production line going through 2022, but 2023 is a question mark.
The Ukrainians have captured some newly built T-90s in Ukraine and have found that the electronics are missing from the tanks. The newly built T-90s are more like 1970s built T-72s with more primitive radios, optical sights in place of the electronic sights, and the targeting computer replaced with an old mechanical design. It's possible that at least some aircraft are being completed with more primitive avionics than pre-war production.
Add the Ukrainian claim of 347 combat aircraft and 325 helicopters lost for Russia to the likely wear and tear losses which is mostly planes being grounded permanently due to combat damage or some critical component breaking and then the plane becomes a parts donor to keep other aircraft flying, Russia has probably lost about 500 of each aircraft type (fixed wing and helos) in total. Maybe a bit less, but that's way more than the ~18 fixed wing aircraft they are producing a year. Even if those 18 are getting the full complement of avionics, it's still a drop in the bucket compared to losses.
I have seen less on Russian helicopter production, but it's not very big either.
Where are they getting modern chips and other electronics for all these planes? They can't even keep their domestic aviation fleet from falling apart.
Russia has been smuggling in some parts. The domestic aircraft market is a lower priority for the Kremlin and smuggling entire black boxes into the country is tougher than acquiring chips. The Russians make most of their military avionics themselves from foreign sourced parts. The airliners require entire modules made for that aircraft and are only available from a very narrow spectrum of suppliers.
Say your flight computer for your Su-34 requires an Intel i5 processor (it probably requires some other processor, but I'm using it as an example). Your agent overseas can source those anywhere. If necessary he could buy a cheap Intel based computer and take it apart. Then the parts are shipped first to a country still doing trade with Russia, an agent in that country repacks it and sends it on to Russia.
The Maldives has turned into a major hub for this activity.
In any developed country getting electronic parts is pretty easy. Here is one of the American parts suppliers
https://www.mouser.com/
If the part is in production, you can get a fair number of them in a few days.
China makes a large number of mid to low end parts. Those are probably what's used on missiles. You don't need a state of the art processor to control a typical missile.
A high end targeting computer on a tank or aircraft probably has a fairly good processor and only two countries make those: South Korea and Taiwan. Though the US is conducting a building boom right now spinning up factories to make those high end devices. It's expected that about 25% of US consumption of those will be American made within the next few years. The goal of the current administration is to make the US completely self reliant on domestic production by 2030.
If the parts needed are common enough, agents for the Kremlin can source them abroad and get them smuggled in. Russia can't smuggle in that many without getting noticed which is probably why new production T-90s have been stripped of their electronics. They might be getting enough chips to make aircraft though. Though it's also possible that the supply chains are being monitored well enough to keep them out of Russian hands.
The mid-grade chips are too ubiquitous to stop. They are cheap and easy to source in just about any developed country. And China makes a high percentage of them, so the Chinese could sell them directly to Russia and there would be no way to track them on the world market.
I thougt that cables would run only to a charging station where multiple bots can be re-charged. I bet they will figure it out.
On a battlefield, any charging stations would become targets.
Modern satellites can track EM emissions from space. Trent Telenko had a thread about that about a year ago. He showed an image for what a US front line HQ looked like from one of these satellites. It was a bright spot on the map that screamed "hit me". The EM emissions from a bot charging station would likely be significant too.
