Ukraine says it cracked open a Russian decoy drone used to fool air defenses and found Western parts inside
Ukraine says it cracked open a Russian decoy drone used to fool air defenses and found Western parts inside
Russia uses unarmed decoy drones to try to distract Ukrainian air defenses, Kyiv's military intelligence agency said Monday.
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
Iron man 2008:
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)
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
I think there's just no way to avoid middle men here. Not with a global supply chain.
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.
>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
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.
Whoops. Capitalism, uh, finds a way.
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
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.
Ukraine wouldn't waste drones like that. Every drone can carry a little something for the Russians.
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
"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.
