In The Washington Post vandaag een mooi artikel over hoe de westerse spionage gemeenschap betrokken is in de uitvoering van de door het westen ingestelde sancties. Dit artikel is natuurlijk bedoeld om aan te tonen dat de sancties werken. Nu zijn de effecten niet zodanig dat ze het grote plaatje beïnvloeden, maar ze vertellen wel een verhaal van Russische tekorten die nu langzamerhand doorsijpelen in de inzetbaarheid van Russische wapens. Zoals ieder artikel in die Amerikaanse kranten weer behoorlijk lang, dus ook gedeeld om zelf te lezen:
Far from the front lines, a spy war rages over Russian weapons
https://wapo.st/3ZDWoZA (gedeeld met email sluis)
Het artikel trapt af met de lage kwaliteit van de laatste batches Russische Geran-2 Drones. Zo kunnen ze geen scherpe bochten draaien zonder in onbalans te raken. Dit gebrek aan aan kwaliteit wordt nog wel gecompenseerd met grote aantallen. De Oekraïense luchtverdediging heeft er soms wel 100 per dag te verwerken. Op het grote beeld is het effect dus nog subtiel. De oorzaak waarom die drones zo slecht worden is wel interessant:
The higher failure rate eventually was linked by Western and Ukrainian military analysts to inferior components, specifically a small steering motor not much bigger than a cigarette pack. Russia had recently switched to a Chinese motor after Western countries imposed sanctions to block Moscow’s access to Western technology.
Voordat we gaan denken dat dit nu overal in Russische hardware gaat doorklinken, dit lijkt vooralsnog een uitzondering op de regel te zijn. Een van de weinige meetbare effecten in veelal onmeetbare invloed van de sancties.
Uitvoering sancties als schaduwgevecht
In de uitvoering van de sancties is een schaduwgevecht bezig tussen westerse geheime diensten en de Russische geheime diensten. In grote lijnen heeft dit twee kanten.
Rusland raakt wel degelijk beknot:
Three years of pressure from an unprecedented sanctions campaign has weakened the Kremlin’s war machine, forcing it to skimp on quality and use older and outdated equipment, U.S. officials say, while putting its long-term viability in serious doubt.
Maar Rusland vecht ook terug:
But Russia still manages to obtain many critical Western weapons parts with help from covert operatives and criminal gangs, and it buys others from China. For now, its forces are steadily gaining ground through sheer numerical advantages, so that the impact of the sanctions on the battlefield is muted, if not erased.
De handhaving van die sancties blijkt zo een uitdaging dat onze geheime diensten meer en meer in de worsteling betrokken zijn geraakt:
In practice, the effort has evolved into an ever-shifting struggle by intelligence agencies and Treasury Department officials to find and dismantle the smuggling routes and supply chains that feed Russia’s arms factories with high-quality Western parts. Success is measured in tanks and missiles that fail to hit their targets, Western analysts say, and drones that cannot fly.
Rusland doet natuurlijk tegenzetten:
Russia has deployed its own intelligence agencies, along with a cast of smugglers, corrupt bureaucrats and criminal gangs, to find creative ways to get around the sanctions, U.S. and European officials say. Moreover, Moscow is increasingly able to turn to China, Iran and India for imitation versions of the Western parts it can no longer get.
Rusland countert het gebrek van kwaliteit met wat ze altijd doet, en altijd heeft gedaan, smoor de tegenstander met grote aantallen van hetzelfde.
Even as more Geran-2s fail to reach their targets, Russia’s arms factories are managing to produce more of them, and at higher rates. Top Ukrainian officials in November acknowledged that endless waves of drones from late summer through autumn had strained the capabilities of Kyiv’s defenders.
Desondanks, kijkend naar de lange termijn effecten, kost de huidige inspanning Rusland verhoudingsgewijs veel. Om enkele argumenten hiervoor aan te dragen:
- Many independent experts agree that sanctions have degraded the quality of Russian equipment and made supply chains more brittle. Russia is losing more tanks and howitzers each month than its factories can make, and continued pressure could eventually force some assembly lines to shut down, U.S. officials and experts say.
- “Even if they are able to get around the sanctions, there are added costs,” said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
Toch zijn ook die sancties nog verre van volmaakt:
Other experts argue that, despite the impressive scale of the sanctions regime against Moscow, Western governments have failed to get Russia’s neighbors and trading partners to fully enforce the measures, opening the way for widespread cheating. In addition, NATO countries have been slow to identify and target some of the Russian defense industry’s vulnerabilities, including several obvious choke points.
We kennen allemaal de voorbeelden waarbij China vervangende hardware levert die niet meer uit het Westen komt. Toch worden ook resultaten bereikt:
For example, while Russia is easily able to buy drone engines and computer chips from China, it still struggles to find adequate supplies of such basic items as high-performance lubricants needed to keep tanks running in cold weather or computerized machine tools essential for building airframes for drones and missiles, said Kristofer Harrison, president of DKP, a Virginia-based nonprofit that tracks illicit networks linked to Russia and other authoritarian regimes. U.S. officials only recently imposed restrictions on machine tool imports to Russia.
“Russia lost almost all of its machine tool industry after the Cold War, and it can’t even make AK-47s without this technology,” Harrison said. “We don’t need to mollify Russia by sacrificing Ukrainians. We just need to deny them the technology to cut metal.”
De Russische uitvoerders
De smokkel van onderdelen naar Rusland wordt gecoördineerd door geheime diensten als FSB en GRU. Op een incidenteel geval na laten deze buitenlandse agenten zich maar moeilijk ontmaskeren:
U.S. investigators said the case reflected the clever tactics used by Russia to conceal its activity. “It’s very typical of the kinds of things that we see,” said a senior law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing criminal case, with other defendants awaiting trial. “We see people setting up complicated shell structures, using third country transshipment points. We see the opacity of the networks and the bank accounts that they’re using — all of it making them more difficult to trace.”
The FSB and its military intelligence counterpart, the GRU, are the unseen hand controlling the smuggling networks, U.S. intelligence officials say. The leaders of the two agencies rarely appear in public. Yet when Konoshchenok received his hero’s welcome at the Moscow airport, standing next to Putin in the receiving line was Alexander Bortnikov, the FSB’s powerful chief.
Since the invasion, both the FSB and GRU have assumed greater responsibility for overseeing the procurement of foreign components, U.S. officials say.
Het westen moet veel in stelling brengen om dit verschijnsel tegen te werken:
Arrayed against the smugglers are Western intelligence analysts, investigators, Treasury officials and diplomats who seek to uncover and disrupt these illicit networks.
Wat slimmigheid is nodig om hierin effectief te zijn:
With so many possible methods and routes for exporting banned goods — including in countries like China where cooperation with U.S. law enforcement is virtually nonexistent — it has proved impossible to block illicit trafficking completely, officials say. Increasingly, the goal is to force Russia to incur higher costs by inducing supply chain delays and shortages that erode Moscow’s ability to put quality weapons in the field.
Voor de verandering is dit tegen werken een keer niet te laat begonnen:
The effort began even before Russian troops invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. As early as late 2021, U.S. intelligence analysts at the CIA and Pentagon were drawing up lists and spreadsheets, trying to identify key foreign suppliers of Russian military technology, as well as points of vulnerability that could cause Moscow’s defense industry to seize up. After the war began, U.S. and Ukrainian military analysts were tasked with figuring out, in granular detail, how Russia’s weapons were made. Investigators stripped down stolen and salvaged Russian aircraft, missiles and tanks, and sought to trace each circuit board and microchip to its country of origin.
Met de gratie van deze kennis konden de sanctie die werden toegepast zo specifiek zijn.
Zand in de Russiche smokkelmachine
Tegelijkertijd wordt voortdurend zand in de Russische smokkelmachine zelf gegooid:
[...] the Justice Department’s “KleptoCapture” task force has filed charges against more than 100 individuals and companies for sanctions evasion and money laundering in support of Russia’s war effort. Cases are moving through European courts as well.
At the Treasury Department, a torrent of sanctions has imposed trade restrictions on thousands of firms and individuals. New ones are added almost every month as front companies pop up to replace those that have been deactivated or forced to close.
Meanwhile, discreet warnings to banks and private companies in the United States and internationally have often been sufficient to scare them away from trade in “dual-use” goods — products that have both military and civilian applications.
De componentenstroom is hiermee niet gedempt:
Western components are getting through anyway, along with growing numbers of Chinese substitutes. In independent studies based on captured Russian weapons, experts have repeatedly shown that Moscow continues to use Western electronic components in its aircraft, tanks and missiles.
Similar investigations have confirmed China’s growing role as a supplier to Russian weapons factories. Trade records made public by Trap Aggressor, a Kyiv-based nonprofit that tracks smuggling networks, showed that Chinese companies supplied $28 million worth of drones and drone components to Russia from early 2023 through this past summer.
Nieuwe Achilleshielen
Steeds moeten Westerse mogendheden nieuwe achilleshelen bij Rusland definieren. Zo heeft Rusland op langere termijn uitdagingen om voldoende artilleriemunitie en lopen voor tanks an artilleriestukken te produceren. En ook het plukken van oud materieel is niet een duurzame oplossing voor Rusland:
“Given the current rate at which the Russians are burning these vehicles, come late 2025 the Russians are going to have a tank shortage,” Barros said, “and that’s going to have massive implications for war fighting at the front lines.”
Een andere achilleshiel zijn westerse digitaal aangestuurde productiemachines:
Other products crucial for modern armies remain difficult to obtain outside the West. U.S. and European firms dominate the global industry for computerized machine tools that make engines and air frames.
Smeermiddelen is ook een onverwachte achilleshiel:
Moscow is surprisingly limited in its ability to make certain refined petroleum products, such as high-performing lubricants used in most engines, including in tanks, said Andrew Fink, a senior Russia analyst for Exovera, a data and research firm based in Northern Virginia. The global industry for chemical precursors for lubricants is dominated by just four companies, all of them American or British. Russia now gets them from a few providers in Asia and Belarus.
Misschien wordt dit nog wel de grootste bottleneck:
“Russia is a raw materials superpower, yet it has serious industrial weaknesses, and advanced machines tools and chemical precursors are two important ones,” Fink said. “With lubricant additives, I’m sure that some Russian PhDs with enough money can make these chemicals on their own in small quantities. But can they come up with thousands of tons a month? That requires a kind of capacity that Russia does not have.”