Russia has been launching optical recon and GLONASS satnav satellites since the conflict started. Especially last year several satellites went up. I put a picture taken by one of these recon satellites on the Russian Military thread just a couple days ago.
With the improved GLONASS satellites i.e. the GLONASS-K2 series plus just having more satellites up you can bet the accuracy of the satnav signal over the battlefield has improved. I also heard rumors that software in some Russian weapon systems was changed to enable them to operate at the higher precision. Instead of entering GLONASS coordinates as 1.234 they are now entered as 1.23456. Something like this. They added two extra digits of precision to software systems.
In Q4 2023 they put the first satellite in the Razdan series up. This is a large recon satellite similar to the US Keyhole series. And in Q4 2023/Q1 2024 they put two Razbeg satellites up. These are small recon sats similar to US commercial recon satellites. The Razbeg satellites are expected to have 0.9m resolution in Panchromatic mode. And the Razdan should have much higher resolution.
Russia has been working on building its own modern space grade electronics since those supplies got sanctioned from the West after the annexation of Crimea. It took a long time to make the electronics, then the whole systems, and the whole satellites, and test them. But now after almost a decade the satellites have been entering service.
If China cut all sales of dual use products to Russia what would have suffered the most would have been the Russian civilian sector. The few components they are talking about which are imported from China that do end up in Russian military products would have been smuggled in anyway. Maybe some weapon systems would have been degraded but I doubt this.
Russia had been preparing for a cut in trade ties with the West for like 8 years. If they hadn't had a secondary source for the simpler COTS semiconductors they would have just developed more of their own supply.
This guy really underestimates Russian industry. Russia has its own chip designers. They have their own semi fabs. And they have a metric ton of software developers. He seems to think Russia cannot develop its own command and control systems. I can tell you that it is highly doubtful that Russia would use an imported software system and connect it to the heart of their military control systems. Especially in the middle of a war. They don't even trust Chinese construction teams to build strategic objects like railways and railways tunnels.
Command and control systems have been in use and development since the Soviet Union. In fact the Soviets had an edge in this over the US for a period. The Soviets had highly advanced command and control theory which predated the US developments for like a decade. The Soviet collapse led to a delay in the modernization of such systems but the modernization has been ongoing since like the early 2000-2010s.
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