Wartime Sanctions Could Squeeze Russian Space Programs

If Russian President Vladimir Putin pulls the proverbial trigger and orders his troops to widen Russia’s war on Ukraine, the United States and its allies have warned they’ll retaliate with economic sanctions.

Some of those sanctions could target Russian arms manufacturers, a White House official told reporters on Jan. 25. Export bans could “impair areas that are of importance to [Putin], whether it’s in artificial intelligence or quantum computing, or defense, or aerospace, or other key sectors.”

It’s obvious where Russia is most vulnerable—in the production of satellites and any other systems that require precision-made microchips. But it’s also apparent, from recent history, that the Kremlin is prepared to adjust its defense planning to mitigate the impact of sanctions.

When Russia began building up forces last spring, raising the prospect of a sharp escalation in the eight-year-old war in eastern Ukraine, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden ruled out direct military intervention in the conflict.

Instead, the Biden administration pledged to respond to Russian aggression with economic measures on top of targeted sanctions on Russian banks, companies and individuals the U.S. Treasury Department levied in April.

“We’ve been clear with Russia about what it will face if it continues on this path, including economic measures that we haven’t used before—massive consequences,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last month.

Russian defense firms use foreign-made chips in many high-tech electronic systems. Taiwan is a major provider. If Washington can lean on Taipei to end chip exports to Moscow, Russia’s efforts to build new precision-guided missiles and spacecraft could take a big hit, experts said.

“It is known that Russia has some difficulty producing various electronic components, especially for satellites,” said Pavel Podvig, an independent expert on the Russian military.

Case in point: the Glonass navigation satellite architecture, Russia’s answer to the American-made Global Positioning System constellation. Moscow has been trying for a decade to replace the roughly two dozen older Glonass-M satellites with newer Glonass-K models.

But after Russian troops seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in February 2014 and subsequently helped anti-government separatists to take control of Ukraine’s Donbas region, the administration of then-U.S. President Barack Obama restricted export to Russia of certain electronics that the Glonass-K required.

That greatly slowed the Glonass replacement program and forced the Kremlin to extend the service-lives of older M-model satellites with fewer foreign parts. Fewer and older satellites means worse navigational accuracy. The projected accuracy of Glonass positioning signals reportedly declined from 60 centimeters to 2.7 meters.

Further sanctions could impose even greater delays on some high-tech programs, particularly in space. In the worst-case scenario for Moscow, defense planners might have no choice but to tweak their long-term plans.

Consider another example of post-Crimea industrial fallout. The Russian naval shipbuilding industry long has imported big maritime engines from Ukrainian firms. For obvious reasons, Kiev ended those exports in 2014.

Today Russia struggles to acquire more than a handful of big combined-diesel-and-gas engines a year for its new warships. That places hard limits on the number of big ships the Russian navy can acquire.

During the Cold War, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, the Soviet navy built 60,000-ton-displacement aircraft carriers and other conventionally-powered surface ships that were nearly as large as anything the U.S. Navy could build.

That’s no longer the case. Now Moscow rarely builds new warships displacing more than 5,500 tons. “Frigates and corvettes, they are the biggest types of warships that Russia is capable of producing in face of the engine challenge,” said Pavel Luzin, another independent expert on Russian forces.

But when it comes to warships, size isn’t necessarily indicative of firepower. To give its small ships teeth, Russia developed the new Kalibr cruise missile—and packed as many launchers as possible into the smallest possible hulls. A Gremyashchiy-class corvette displacing just 2,500 tons packs eight Kalibr launchers, giving it more land-attack firepower than some Western warships that are three times as massive.

To be fair, sanctions could slow the production of missiles such as Kalibr, too. In any event, the Russian military and its supporting industry have proved they can adapt to economic hardship.

Post-Crimea sanctions didn’t deter Moscow from instigating the current crisis. There’s no reason to believe the threat of fresh sanctions will deter Putin from ordering a wider attack on Ukraine, if a wider attack is what he wants.

And it’s worth pointing out which industries never would be affected by export-bans. “The manufacturers of strategic missiles and nuclear weapons are independent of import components,” Luzin said.