Commentary by Russian military journalist Bris Rozhin:
[ColonelCassad] Regarding reports about restrictions on the purchase of Chinese drones by volunteers for the needs of the RF Armed Forces.
Those who are involved in the process know that in practice this will affect a little more than nothing - drones have been and will be purchased in China and third countries and imported into the Russian Federation in commercial quantities. This is a direct consequence of the failure of the West's strategy of economic and trade isolation of Russia.
Of course, there are a number of problems that, as a rule, do not write about in the "sensational" headlines "China banned the purchase of drones", but they are not of any administrative nature. From a commercial point of view, there are no problems with the purchase of drones at the moment and are not expected.
It is worth clarifying that we are talking about the purchase of commercial and industrial drones. Ukraine buys from the same way, through third countries. Military drones like Wing Loong 4 or 5 were not recorded at the front. Which of course does not mean that they will not appear sometime later, but at the moment there is no evidence that China has supplied us with serial military drones.
The Americans have been pumping up on this for more than a month, but they cannot present anything to China. At the same time, of course, they are making efforts to make it difficult for Russia to purchase Chinese drones, but they cannot stop it due to the lack of the possibility of trade isolation of the Russian Federation.
At the same time, the urgent need to expand production capacities for the production of drones directly in Russia and the construction of new enterprises is not removed. Production volumes have obviously grown over the year (especially for Cubes and Lancets, it is noticeable, but this is not enough.
The front de facto requires thousands and thousands of drones. And while we do not fully cover the needs, the ability to stock up with the Chinese will play an important role in providing our troops with this consumable.