Summary
Ukraine’s military intelligence reported finding Western-made components inside Russian decoy drones, used in recent swarm attacks to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses.
Dubbed “Parody,” these decoys are cheaper than Iran’s Shahed-136 drones but can mimic their radar signatures, creating fake targets to distract defenses.
Russia reportedly launched over 2,000 drones last month, half of which were decoys, with some crashing in Moldova, raising regional security concerns.
Despite sanctions, Western technology continues to appear in Russian weapons, complicating efforts to restrict Moscow’s drone capabilities.
Israel’s been illegally selling weapons to Russia for quite a while. But all of the people who could do anything about it are afraid to hold Israel accountable.
russia doesn’t need Israeli help to get access to American parts
All the way back in the Cold War the Soviets had a governmental department specifically to source parts from the West that was blocked off to sanctions. They have decades of experience creating shell companies, intermediaries, etc.
if someone wants to do more research the parent organization was “First Main Directorate of the Committee for State Security under the USSR council of ministers” and the department was called “Directorate T: Scientific and Technical Intelligence” sometimes referred to as just “Line X”
so basically the Russians have had many decades of experience circumventing sanctions and export controls. The Russians, while a shell of the former USSR, still have a lot of the human capital and base of experience in this regard.
I remember reading an article on Reuters or Washington Post or something where apparently even after sanctions, the Russians are getting roughly 90% of the high-tech components they were getting before the war. So the sanctions have hurt, but by a marginal amount. I think it’s this article: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/western-industrial-components-rebuilding-russias-military-2024-08-16/ but Reuters is now paywalled for me
russia doesn’t need Israeli help to get access to American parts
But it sure helps.
Is this a hasbara attempt to deflect from the fact that Israel is selling weapons to Russia?
if you look at my history it isn’t particularly pro-israeli
it’s just that in this specific context, I don’t think it’s as significant as it may seem on first reading. Israel has had a long relationship of cooperation with Russia. Although lately things have gotten more tense between the two, with Iran and Russia becoming closer. Iran is Israel’s mortal enemy and Russia supplying money and tech transfer over in exchange for Shaheeds is a big no-no for them
so while yes, there probably are pro-Russian elements in the Israeli state that have probably helped Russia circumvent sanctions and export controls… the brunt of their materials probably comes from China, from European sources, and maybe even American companies themselves.
What is that “probably” based on?
Israel has a history of arming their enemies and extremists to intentionally destabilize the region. They founded and materially supported Hamas, even as they fired rockets into Israel, in order to undermine peaceful secular groups.
not saying they don’t do all of that. read the reuters article i linked before. or this one: https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/03/why-russia-has-been-so-resilient-to-western-export-controls?lang=en
russia does not need israel. they have complex and sophisticated systems that these days use China a lot but they don’t even need China. it’s sometimes impossible to tell whether you’re selling your microwaves to a russian company or not. it’ll look like a legit company, and then it gets somehow routed to russia and they use the microchips or whatever.
all i’m saying is
a) it doesn’t need Israel’s help for this.
b) israel doesn’t have the industrial capacity (small country, gdp only $500B) the geopolitical position for it (they are a tool of US interests and would not meaningfully harm US interests) and the domestic will for it (again, russia is friends with Iran, Israel’s mortal enemy)
there absolutely are parts of the government that will support Russia. Almost half of Israelis speak Russian and have connections to that area. So yeah, of course. But from a top-down directive it’s doubtful
notice i’m not denying Israel does not supply extremists. i’m specifically referring to this russia-israel dynamic
yes, israel supports extremists. they have a very advanced intelligence system and do all sorts of crazy shit. they’re wild. i agree
Israel would not meaningfully harm US interests?! Bahahahha!
Israel & the US are more or less one and the same. if i remember correctly, 98% of representatives in congress last election cycle was endorsed by the AIPAC
there’s a reason we can only vote for pro-Israeli politicians. Israel projects US power in the mideast
Yes, and the Americans did it as well
The Ukrainian government has a vast list of all the electronics they are finding in Russian weapons and where they came from. It’s actually pretty impressive.
Looking at that list, most things look like very basic components that can be easily found on aliexpress, and thus in China, and thus probably easy to get for Russia. Are we going to forbid selling those components to China or how is this supposed to work? (genuinely curious)
I think there’s just no way to avoid middle men here. Not with a global supply chain.
That is basically how ITAR export controls work, but only for much more complicated weapon parts like nukes and fighter jets. It’s basically impossible to stop the flow of stuff that any country can make. The parts in this article would likely fall under EAR99, explicitly allowed to sell to any not-embargoed country.
Source: was a business area export representative (BAER) and yes I know this is an oversimplification
Nice! Would be funny if companies were fined by how much of their shit made it there.
Someone probably should the governmental stick up their ass for this. I’m pretty sure all the parts that end up in Russian arsenal have export restrictions and should, in theory, have strict oversight. You can’t just export into another country and forget about it. If those parts want to be to be exported into another country that information should come back to the seller(or the government agency, don’t really remember the specifics) who then have to give clearance for that and any future exports. But you can’t keep track of under the table deals. Hopefully this gets investigated and justice is served but I don’t have much faith.
Iron man 2008:
>Russian Drone
>Look inside
>Western components
name of the company making those components and allowing them get to russia should be publicly known
https://war-sanctions.gur.gov.ua/en/components
Apparently it is
i hope they go under, my own country could easily be the one getting bombed by russians
Are they being sold to Russia directly, or is Russia buying them through an intermediary to skirt around sanctions.
Essentially nation-level straw purchasing.
Thats capitalism baby, we gotta profit from both aides during the war
Yeah, it’s the whole point of the war. Who’s going to steal ukrainian resources after capital profits massively from destroying the country?
$20 is $20
I don’t think sanctions will prevent literally everything from getting to Russia, but it will make it much slower and reduce the quantity substantially.
I mean … of course they did. I’m sure there are plenty of wartime purposes for general use and consumer electronics parts.
True, as seen by Russian fighter pilots literally taping consumer GPS units to the cockpit, but Russia is under sanctions and should not be receiving any silicon for general or consumer use either
Actual weapons get laundered through third party nations; I have to think that consumer electronics would be vastly easier to do the same with.
Yeah you can literally reprogram microcontrollers out of smart bulbs and use them to fly drones or guide missiles. General purpose CPU means general purpose CPU.
I was going to say “doubt” because I’ve seen various smart bulb development prototypes (ancient technology by now), but then it occurred to me that once you nix the parts that drive LEDs from AC, you got yourself a nice lil mc board. With some fancy soldering (better than anything I could do) you could probably get access to a couple extra pins. If you can get access to whatever reprogramming interface it has on just one, youve now got yourself a fligh controller. You’ll need a radio, but I imagine Russia has something for that, or maybe they have something fancy with whatever the 2.4Ghz radio provides.
Then you need PWM signals for motor control and you need an accelerometer and gyro. Every phone and your grandmother has those. Program in your flight software to fly the drone the way you want with all the sensors and radios. Then you just need a battery adapter and escs for the BLDCs.
If you get a shipment of 10k bulbs and have a process for extracting it - you got up to 10k drone brains.
I actually cracked one open once a couple years ago, forgot which brand, but there was literally just a regular old ESP8266 module soldered onto the board. All you need is a USB to TTL serial adapter to reflash it, and then use a hobby knife to cut and isolate the GPIO pins you’re going to use.
Edit: Better yet, if I was a sanctioned rogue state, I’d use what little PCB fab capabilities I have left to just have boards ready to go to drop in the controller from the bulbs. It’d just take seconds with a hot air station.
Yup. They’ve been doing this at scale by cannibalizing home appliances: https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/russia-using-refrigerator-parts-build-missiles-western-sanctions-impact-on-economy-reports-2384642-2023-05-26 (Sorry for the shitty site, better sources were paywalled.)
Yeah, you’re not wrong
The point is that there’s sanctions, and the sanctions are supposed to prevent those parts from getting into Russia. It’s not surprising to a lot of us that sanctions are ineffective at anything other than hurting the general population, but it’s good to report it and have that data point.
“Western parts”? What do we still manufacfure in the west?
$80.9 Billion USD of weapons and vehicles for military use were sold to foreign countries in FY2023.
Domestically, the US Military spent about 820.3 Billion.
Other products in 2022, sorted by amount in Billions would be the items listed in this table:
From Table 2 of “What is made in America?” on Commerce dot gov
So it looks like Tobacco, guns, vehicles, and Petrochem is the answer.
There is a very nice open source project which made software for drone motor drivers which shut down due to the sanctions as it was open sourced and was accessed by Russians and contributing to their war effort. So there is so many little things like that. It’s the blheli project.
When are we going to see the revision of parody fighting? It is stupid to fight RC planes with super expensive rockets. There should be distributed assets of interceptor drones of an equivalent class to fight fire with fire instead of throwing gold bricks at pigeons
Do you mean parity?
Parody fighting:
I mean the drones are apparently designated as “parody” so either should work
RC Hobbiests become the most in demand job.
At that point aren’t they RC professionals?
Only surviving ones
So it’s more like RC Aces then
Whoops. Capitalism, uh, finds a way.
Ukraine wouldn’t waste drones like that. Every drone can carry a little something for the Russians.
