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Russia Says It's Assembled a Lithography Machine, Will Make 350nm Chips Soon
(www.extremetech.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is a bit further than sane. I think you've got the idea from Russian marauders stealing washing machines. They were just marauders.
But yes, and not even Soviet, but relatively new things may not require too advanced chips.
I think a lot of that works on TTL logic and relays frankly. And not even only in Russia. While NATO countries had access to a much easier supply of chips, reliability is a factor too in military tech. Keep it simple, stupid, and all that.
No -- two different washing machine incidents.
There were some documented incidents of Russian soldiers in Ukraine looting washing machines, which was highlighted by the press.
There's a second issue that Russia was using secondhand chips:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russian-military-equipment-computer-chips-refrigerators/
It's also apparently not just Russia that was doing this during the COVID-19 chip shortages:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/washing-machines-raied-to-obtain-semiconductors
My guess is that this probably isn't a case where companies are producing high-volume things. They're making some very expensive, low-volume things, and they're bottlenecked by one part that they can't get.