Machine Tools Are Russia’s Most Critical Import

The major NATO nations tried with at least the same fervor to destroy and loot Russia’s economy in the 1990s, when that nation under President Boris Yeltsin was striving to be an ally of the West. Perhaps the clearest proof is the decline in Russia’s population, which reached 1 million per year. In second place: The complete elimination by looting of the Soviet Union’s then-well developed, even leading machine-tool capacity. Russian production of machine tools, measured in parts or “pieces,” was 74,000 in 1990, 18,000 in 1995, and 2,000 in 2009, then 4,000 in 2016. So of Russia’s major imports in 2021, machine tools constituted by far the largest sector by value, at more than 30% of the total. To the extent that Russia needs the advanced semiconductors for production of, for example, satellites, the Taiwan, European and U.S. semiconductor makers have been refusing to export them to Russia since the middle of the last decade, even without any specific sanction against such exports. So here it depends on China, the world’s largest, though not most advanced, machine-tool maker.