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.
Kremlev is more than just an oligarch.
ProPublica showed that Umar Kremlev paid for Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding. Calling him an oligarch is too kind. Kremlev is a convicted extortionist turned frontman for the FSO — Putin's personal bodyguard service — and that is who really picked up the tab.
Our research analyst Mitchell Polman, writing at CEPA, on the flag-by-flag campaign forcing Russia's tankers under the price cap.
Ukraine's strikes on tankers make headlines. The quieter campaign is diplomatic — stripping flags of convenience from the shadow fleet so every sanctioned tanker sails under Russian colors, inside the price cap. DKP's Mitchell Polman maps it at CEPA's Europe's Edge.
Yabloko is banned. The “opposition” the Kremlin lets you see is the opposition the Kremlin built.
Russia's high court just banned the only anti-war party. The more revealing story is the one polling second: New People, a party built to capture dissent, dress up election commissions, and dupe foreigners. Here is how to spot the species.
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.
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.
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.
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