"Armed to Death – How Putin’s Army Is Breaking on Western Spare Parts" - Investigations into the Depths of Russia

It does not begin with explosions, but with lawsuits. Not on the front lines, but in the chambers of Russian arbitration courts, whose dry transcripts reveal more than any military press conference. Anyone who wants to understand today how deeply Western sanctions are shaking the backbone of Russia’s war machinery must understand the language of legal clauses – and the loopholes in which an entire system is beginning to unravel. The Russian defense industry, proud of its supposed sovereignty, is dependent. Dependent on chips, oscilloscopes, FPGAs – on those invisible building blocks that make modern warfare possible in the first place. These rarely come from Russia itself, but from Switzerland, the United Kingdom, China, Taiwan, or the United States. And they arrive, if at all, via detours: through shell companies in Turkey, through banks in Kyrgyzstan, through intermediaries who must disguise themselves like spies. The result is a shadow market – and a legal apparatus that, in its effort to impose order, unintentionally documents the chaos. One case involves the company "Northern Star" in St. Petersburg, which procured high-performance chips from China and Estonia for the Russian Ministry of Defense through a shell company in the British Virgin Islands. When payment failed, the supplier filed suit – 65 million rubles, about 830,000 dollars. Other companies like Zaslon, close to Turchak, received used microprocessors with scratches. Still others fell victim to their own fraud: They ordered supposedly original FPGA chips from the brand Xilinx through intermediaries – what they received were worthless Chinese counterfeits that could not be integrated with Russian military software. The fact that the smuggling route ran through a British overseas territory borders on the tragicomic. Because in this case, the British government can effortlessly trace who stands behind the corporate facades – and thus expose the entire network.

But it is not only dubious offshore constructions that are collapsing. Even established state corporations like Zaslon, run by the family of influential politician Andrei Turchak, must now face court proceedings. They do not only dispute the quality of the delivered chips, but demonstrate that these were apparently used, scratched, perhaps even recycled. Even the microstructure – once the silent symbol of technological military progress – becomes evidence in a process of creeping implosion. What weighs even more heavily is that urgently needed high-end components – such as programmable chips for drone detection and air defense – are being replaced by cheap Chinese knockoffs that ultimately prove unusable. Russian defense firms openly admit: they cannot integrate the Chinese substitute products into their systems. The attempt to replace Western software with improvised solutions fails due to the reality of compatibility – and the court confirms: the sanctions are working. It is a victory of export control law over the supposed autonomy of an autocratic state. The sanctions cut deeper than any bomb. In St. Petersburg, an attempt was uncovered to import a navigation module from the British company CML Microcircuits via Turkey. The British grew suspicious when ten different orders for the rare module came in within a month – and blocked the shipment. In other cases, Swiss manufacturers like AnaPico refused any cooperation. Even banks in Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, or Uzbekistan are now blocking accounts of Russian shell firms if they suspect dual-use goods are being imported for military purposes. And then there is the story of a British company that suddenly grew suspicious. It had received over ten contradictory requests for the same special module within a few weeks – all with different recipients, but with the same true target: the Russian military. The delivery was stopped, the cover was blown – and another link in the supply chain broke. These court documents reveal not only legal disputes, but also growing paranoia on the part of manufacturers, who themselves do not want to risk violating international rules.

Even Russia’s once-prized shipbuilding industry is reeling. Projects like the corvettes “Grozny” and “Bravy” are stalling because antenna systems are missing – systems based on microchips that once came from European factories – or rather: used to come. Because spare parts from Russian production turn out, in retrospect, to be a sham, their “domestic” labels concealing imported goods that are no longer available. A creeping bankruptcy of the claim that sanctions can be offset by national pride. The extent of uncertainty is apparent even where vehicles must be replaced: the National Guard flatly refused to accept an anti-drone system because it was mounted on a GAZelle chassis – not the originally planned Ford Transit. The reason? Western manufacturers have left Russia. The system itself may have been intact – trust was not. The problem lies even deeper in the banks. More and more institutions in Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan are closing Russian firms’ accounts as soon as they suspect the exports may be military-related. Payment routes collapse before contracts can even be signed. The uncertainty is now so great that Western manufacturers like Rohde & Schwarz are halting deliveries entirely – fearing they might land on a sanctions list. What is emerging in these court records is an economic earthquake that no Kremlin spokesperson can talk away. Decades of imports, the neglect of domestic innovation, the dependency on foreign countries – all of it is now taking its toll. And no amount of money can change that. Because the sanctions do not target individuals, not names on lists – they strike at the system itself, in its structure, in its silent complicity with the globalized world. The myth of Russian self-sufficiency, nourished by propaganda and pathos, is breaking apart on the realities of international supply chains. You don’t need bombs to disarm a regime. It is enough for the world to deny it the materials it needs to wage war. Russia’s arbitration courts have long understood this – even if they are not allowed to say so.