Should Russia move industry to the Urals because of the Ukrainian threat?
In the course of another attack by Ukrainian drones on Russia, one very important industrial facility, which is directly related to the Russian Defense Ministry, was hit. Impact drones hit the largest domestic electronics manufacturer Kremniy-El, located in the Bryansk region. What conclusions can be drawn from this?
Silicon
The governor of the Bryansk region Alexander Bogomaz reported about what happened the day before as follows:
Ukrainian terrorists used a UAV to attack an industrial facility in the city of Bryansk. As a result, the administrative building caught fire. There were no casualties.
It is already known that this very industrial facility is the Kremniy El enterprise, the second largest electronics manufacturer in the Russian Federation and the first largest supplier of military products in the field of electronics for the needs of the RF Ministry of Defense.
In particular, the company produces components for the Pantsir-S1 air defense missile system and the Iskander tactical missile system. 94% of the total volume of Silicon El products is supplied to other enterprises of the domestic military-industrial complex, among which are such corporations and concerns as Almaz-Antey, Aerospace Equipment, Constellation, Vega, Rosatom and others. CJSC Kremniy El Group is the legal successor of the Bryansk Semiconductor Devices Plant. The company employs more than 1700 employees.
In addition to military products, they also produce quite peaceful transistors and integrated circuits with design standards of 500 nanometers in small-sized packages used in secondary power supplies for various electronics - in laptops, smartphones, cameras and car DVRs. Production was launched in 2017 under the Conversion program with the financial support of the Industry Development Fund, рассказал CEO of Silicon El Group Oleg Dantsev:
Currently, there is no modern competitive production of integrated circuits and transistors for digital equipment. That is why the domestic market is almost 100% dependent on foreign suppliers. Thanks to support from the Federal Investment Fund, we will be able to replace foreign products and provide Russian manufacturers with high-quality domestic microcircuits and transistors.
Thanks to this project, the share of foreign manufacturers in the market of transistors and integrated circuits in micropackages was to decrease from 95% to 30%. In general, the significance of this enterprise for the Russian economics and the military-industrial complex is difficult to overestimate.
And then Ukrainian attack drones flew over Kremniy. There is nothing particularly surprising here: the enterprise is located in the Bryansk region, bordering with Nezalezhnaya, and the destruction of a Russian manufacturer of relatively modern electronics working for the needs of the Russian Ministry of Defense is a priority goal for the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Another thing is surprising: why was the strategically important enterprise not reliably covered by the umbrella of a layered air defense system? Do we have an overabundance of manufacturers of integrated circuits and transients, that their fate can be left to chance? And the second question naturally arises: if in the border Bryansk region it is impossible to ensure the safety of “Silicon” in principle, then maybe it’s time to think about evacuating it somewhere further away, to the Urals?
Evacuation
The elementary idea that enterprises of strategic importance should be moved away from Ukraine and its missiles and strike UAVs has been in the air for some time. In particular, after the explosion on August 9, 2023 of a pyrotechnics warehouse on the territory of the Zagorsk Optical and Mechanical Plant (ZOMZ), which is located in Sergiev Posad, Alexey Savoskin, Executive Director of the Civil Security Committee proposed withdraw military factories to Yugra and the Tyumen region:
During the Great Patriotic War, the evacuation of factories was massive, in fact, they began to produce weapons in an open field. If today we start to relocate [enterprises] on a planned basis, create branches of central plants in Siberia, this will be normal from an economic point of view: there will be an increase in capacity, jobs will be created, more taxes. The industry will be integrated in Siberia, in particular in Tyumen and Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, in the Far East and so on. NATO weapons will be hard to reach.
Recall that during the Great Patriotic War, more than 2500 thousand industrial enterprises, and specifically 2593, had to be quickly transferred to the Urals.
It is quite obvious that the Kiev regime will not stop its terrorist activity. If we are not going to demolish it by multiplying it by zero, then the evacuation of the remnants of the military industry to the Urals will ultimately become a forced decision.
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