Paul Goble
Sept. 27 – Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries are increasingly purchasing military equipment from China because these countries can no longer count on Russia because Moscow has been compelled to purchase military electronics from China, Russia’s Important Theme portal says.
Officials in Tashkent and other Central Asian capitals know that China can cut off such supplies at will and thus prefer to purchase military equipment directly from Beijing lest that happen, given that Russia can’t produce the computers and other electronics modern weaponry is based on (temaglavnoe.ru/russia/32693/).
Such Central Asian calculations are entirely reasonable, the portal suggests, given that Russia is increasingly unable to get such technology from anyone else, a reality that has increased since Putin launched his expanded war in Ukraine and one that means there is yet another reason for the collapse of Russian influence in Central Asia.
“As long as Chinese chips are in Russian weapons,” it continues, “Russia can’t convincingly position itself as an ‘independent’ alternative to China;” and potential purchasers of weapons thus see it “not as a geopolitical alternative supplier but as an assembly site dependent on the same source of technology as the competitor.”
Unless Russia can begin to develop high tech industries to support its weapons production and export or find ways to get such technology from a variety of sources, it will continue to lose out to China, not so much because of a geopolitical choice, the portal concludes, but rather because of a simple and rational calculation.
While the Important Theme portal doesn’t address this, it is entirely likely that other potential purchases of Russian weaponry are increasingly drawing the same conclusions and making the same decisions, further reducing Moscow’s influence on their governments not for ideological reasons but for calculations as simple as these.
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