More evidence sanctions failed, and European countries are fearful that more sanctions would make things worse.
I don't know the precise details obviously, but I get the distinct impression when they talk about electronics sanctions they're mostly referring to consumer electronics and maybe computing parts for consumer, industrial and military use (CPUs, memory, motherboards, etc.) and not low-level components like capacitors, MOSFETs, transformers, DC motors and the like.
In other words they're patting themselves on the back for "denying" Russia access to the latest and greatest Intel and AMD CPUs and that fancy DDR5 DRAM tech. "Forcing" the Russians to stick with older, inferior hardware like lowly Pentium 4's or Athlons. No $2,000 folding phones for you, vatniks!
Assuming this is what's actually happening (and it makes sense, because lower-level parts are
much more broadly available than fancy new CPUs), it demonstrates another symptom of Western thinking: we completely and utterly
suck at building efficient systems and writing efficient software in the west, and we think everyone else does too. Often we're not wrong (observe pajeet software "engineering" for the canonical example of overpaid incompetence) but there are quite a few pockets of absurdly talented engineers out there, and Russia is one of them.
Just twenty years ago you could browse the internet, run a word processor and engage in real-time chat (like AIM, MSN chat, etc.) on a PC with a 100Mhz 80486 and 16MB of RAM. I was about to write that it wasn't as fast as on modern gear, but JFC take a modern beast with monster specs, load up Chrome and hit up a mainstream website without an ad blocker. I wouldn't be surprised if the old experience was either on-par or actually faster. We flew the Space Shuttle for decades on radiation-hardened 386's and 486's (and that was the
upgraded avionics package). We flew to the moon in 1969 on little more than relays and transistors attached to switches and LEDs. The assembly-language source code for the Apollo flight computer is a work of art. Imagine what the greybeards from 1969 could do with a modern 4GHz Ryzen 9. Holy shit.
We (in the west) don't really know how to do that kind of shit anymore. We've gotten lazier, our tools have gotten bulkier and less efficient, and for decades now we've "solved" our "shit's running slower lol" problem by throwing more hardware at it. Modern software tooling is utterly ridiculous -- entire desktop applications are built on bundled web browsers now that weigh in at over 100MB
just for the runtime platform.
Russia, having never been at the forefront of super-fast semiconductor electronics, has developed a much more pragmatic attitude and skillset when it comes to hardware and software development. That's not to say they're more "sophisticated" (though they often are) but they're much better at squeezing every last drop of performance from their gear than we are (mostly because they still care about that). Hell, look at the malware they crank out. We're skr1pt kidd13z here compared to the stuff they ship to the world.
I sincerely doubt the Russians feel all that constrained with "only" having access to the kinds of chips the Chinese can ship them. Look at all the cool stuff you can do on a lowly Raspberry Pi, for example. Comparable babby boards can be had from all manner of manufacturers from all around the world, including from countries that don't bother with this sanction bullshit. Nice & cheap, too.
Yet more sanctions that mean nothing to Russia but potentially fuck over everyone else. Brilliant move, "leaders."
