The Dekleptocracy Project
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Field notes from the research desk.

Short essays on what we are seeing in Russia's supply chains, the firms still selling to Moscow, and the soft underbellies a patient analyst can find without leaving a desk.

Russia can't make the binder its rocket fuel needs
The Dekleptocracy Project

Russia can't make the binder its rocket fuel needs

Russian solid rocket fuel depends on cellulose acetate that Russia cannot produce. The contracts insist on French-origin material from a plant that shut down in 2020.

The Perm Powder Plant needs imported cellulose acetate to bind its solid rocket fuel, and its contracts specify French material from a Cerdia plant that closed in 2020. The shipments came from Kingsport, Tennessee instead, until they stopped in July 2022 and a Chinese supplier took over.

RussiaChemicalsMissilesSupply Chain
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Russian-Chinese AI Chip Production Cooperation
The Dekleptocracy Project

Russian-Chinese AI Chip Production Cooperation

Baikal's new AI chips won't catch NVIDIA. What the announcement really reveals is a Russian bet on Chinese fabs.

Russia's Baikal Electronics says it will take on NVIDIA in the AI-accelerator market. It can't. But the chips it is promising would be made in China, subsidizing Chinese AI chipmaking — and a six-year-old chip design is still good enough to pilot a suicide drone.

RussiaChinaSemiconductorsDrones
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Why Putin moved Patrushev to a body almost no one has heard of
The Dekleptocracy Project

Why Putin moved Patrushev to a body almost no one has heard of

Russia's biggest long-term vulnerability isn't tanks or microchips. It's ships.

Patrushev wasn't sidelined. He was reassigned to the problem the Kremlin now treats as existential — a shipbuilding industry that cannot supply its own oil-export fleet.

RussiaShadow FleetSanctionsShipbuilding
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