Sanctions have crippled Baikal’s production and packaging capabilities
Why it matters: Global sanctions against Russian companies have worked in at least one respect: Baikal Electronics can no longer supply enough chips to meet the country’s needs, and half of the chips it produces are defective. Russia is working to build up its domestic capabilities, but it is unclear whether it can catch up.
Baikal Electronics, one of Russia’s major processor developers, has been struggling in the wake of sanctions imposed by the US and UK governments following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Until then, the company ordered the production of chips, including their packaging, from TSMC.
The Taiwan-based chipmaker promptly stopped shipping processors that year because of the sanctions. The sanctions also blocked the Russian company from licensing Arm technology. Baikal, which switched from the Baikal-T series MIPS instruction set architecture to Arm years ago, used the technology in its Baikal-M, -S, and -L series chips.
The supply restrictions forced the company to turn inward to produce packaged and tested silicon. Russian business news outlet Vedomosti recently revealed that about half of the processors packaged in Russia are defective. A source told the paper that the failures are due to equipment that is not configured correctly and not having enough properly trained technicians for the chip packaging.
There are two important sides to this and you are only focusing one of them.
One is of course supporting Ukraine, as you point out, but what is also extremely important is not to let Russia get away with their obvious bullshit propaganda.
Russia is working hard on getting rid of the sanctions. One of the main tools used are to try to get people in the West to believe to Russian economy is unaffected.
It is not.
(If it was, Putin wouldn’t fx deal with North Korea like they’ve been doing the last year.)
So if no one was calling out Putin and his useful idiots on fx Facebook or Lemmy, how long do you think the public in the West would support Ukraine?
Russia didn’t need NK for anything that the west could have substituted it for. They needed them for ammo. As it stands, with that respite, they are well ahead of Ukraine on that issue because their production is stronger.
You’re not calling out shit. You’re pandering to delusions that need to be disspelled. Because there are facts. And those facts are that Russia will win if Ukraine doesn’t get more support. Nobody is about to dismantle sanctions against Russia.
