Vladimir Putin controls the supply chain of western technology, so who is bluffing?

The wishful thinking has begun. Core Europe is already persuading itself that Vladimir Putin will be sated with Donetsk and Luhansk, allowing European companies to keep selling Gucci bags and BMWs to Russia in exchange for commodities – after a stern lecture on international law, of course.

The US, UK, and Poland have reached the opposite conclusion, strongly suspecting that the military occupation of the Donbas is the springboard for a full invasion of Ukraine.

Bear in mind what Putin has lost by this action: he has killed the Minsk accord and therefore ended the possibility of controlling Kyiv’s foreign and security policy through the veto power of these two puppet regions.

If he left it there, he would emerge from this crisis in a weaker strategic position.

This stretches credulity, since two-thirds of the Russian army is coiled for a strike on the border, with little to stop them except Ukraine’s valiant but ill-armed reservists.

Mr Putin is not even hiding his intention.

As he said in his diatribe last night, Ukraine was an artificial creation of the Bolsheviks after Brest-Litovsk in 1918 and “never had a tradition of genuine statehood”.

The Munich Security Summit over the weekend was a love-fest of transatlantic unity, a choreographed effort to show that all key countries agree on far-reaching sanctions if he attacks.

The words “massive” and “devastating” were repeated ad nauseam, as if it were an agreed script.

But this Potemkin unity is unlikely to alter the Kremlin calculus. The West cannot activate serious measures because it risks an asymmetric response – a lighter variant of ‘mutual assured destruction’ from the Cold War.

It is already well understood that Europe is a captive of Russian gas, and dares not eject Russia from the SWIFT system of international payments because it would suffer a more immediate crisis than fortress Russia itself.

Less understood is the technology angle.

Washington professes to have a killer weapon that avoids such a risk of blowback and will therefore cause Putin to hesitate: it threatens to cut off Russian access to the global market for semiconductor chips.

This would be the modern equivalent of a 20th century oil embargo, since chips are the critical fuel of the electronic economy.

It would gradually asphyxiate Russia’s advanced industries, and would in theory reduce Putin’s regime to a stunted technological dwarf.

But this too is a dangerous game. Putin has the means to cut off critical minerals and gases needed to sustain the West’s supply chain for semiconductor chips, upping the ante in the middle of a worldwide chip crunch.

Furthermore, he could hobble the aerospace and armaments industry in the US and Europe by restricting supply of titanium, palladium, and other metals.

If he controlled Ukraine, his control over key strategic minerals would be even more dominant, giving him leverage akin to Opec’s energy stranglehold in 1973.

The Kremlin could unleash an inflation shock every bit as violent as the first oil crisis, with a recession to match.

The White House has been slow to wake up to Russia’s counter-strike capability. It did not canvas US semiconductor companies on the risk until the critical materials firm Technet revealed the extent of US dependency on Russian supply of C4F6 gas, neon, palladium, scandium.

Some 90pc of the world supply of neon, used as laser gas for chip lithography, comes from Russia and Ukraine. Two-thirds of this is purified for the global market by one company in Odessa. There are other long-term sources of neon in Africa but that is irrelevant in the short run.

Technet said Russian C4F6 gas is used for etching node logic devices. Palladium is used for sensors, plating material and computer memory (MRAM).

The world’s biggest producer of titanium is VSMPO-AVISMA, located in the ‘Titanium Valley’ of Western Siberia.

It is part-owned by Rostec, the state conglomerate controlled by Sergey Chemezov, an ex-KGB operative who served with Putin in East Germany. Russia and Ukraine together account for 30pc of the global supply of titanium, but this understates their hegemony over the production chain.

VSMPO-AVISMA supplies 35pc of Boeing’s titanium, mostly for 737, 767, 777, and 787 jets. It is used in engines, fans, disks and frames, prized for its resistance to heat and corrosion, and for its ratio of weight to strength.

The US Bureau of Industry and Security published a report last October warning that VSMPO-AVISMA was providing titanium sponge to customers in the US at “artificially low” prices, with Russian state support, enabling it to capture a “significant share of Boeing's business”.

This should have raised a red flag. Weeks later Boeing committed to even deeper ties with the company.

In effect, Russia has been doing what China did earlier with rare earth metals: establishing a lockhold by selling below cost and knocking out the Western supply chain. The report said Russia is increasingly able to use this dominance “as a tool of geopolitical leverage”.

The Bureau warned that the US is down to one ageing plant capable of producing titanium sponge at scale, and no longer has any titanium reserve in the National Defense Stockpile.

It relies on supply from a hostile state-controlled entity to build US fighter jets, rockets, missiles, submarines, helicopters, satellites, and advanced weaponry. The report called for urgent measures to rebuild domestic production and acquire strategic reserves. What a shambles.

A spokesperson for VSMPO-AVISMA said, "Only a small amount of titanium sponge produced by VSMPO-AVISMA is exported. The titanium sponge supplied to the foreign markets is for general industrial applications and is not suitable for aircraft construction. All titanium sponge produced and suitable for aerospace industry is used by VSMPO-AVISMA for production at its facilities in Russia."

Airbus is even more vulnerable. Half its titanium sponge comes from Russia.

Britain’s aerospace industry depends on Russian supply. VSMPO-AVISMA has an operation near Birmingham, making commercial alloys for aerospace, medical technology, and the military.

Mr Putin knows that the pain threshold in the West is low after the fiasco of US sanctions against the aluminium producer Rusal in 2018.

The US Treasury thought aluminium was a fungible commodity and that cutting off Rusal supply would not matter much.

It learned a harsh lesson in market reality: global alumina prices doubled; the supply chain seized up; and there was collateral damage everywhere.

The bureaucrats had failed to understand the stringent certification process in the industry. But the point is deeper. Russia cannot be strangled because it is systemically central to the world economy.

Nor can Washington easily deny Russia semiconductor chips over the long run. The country has its own home-grown chip companies, led by Baikal and Micron.

They can make mid-grade chips down to 28-nanometres (nm), adequate for mobile phones and the like. These companies could undoubtedly raise their game if it were a top national priority.

Russia cannot make 5nm and 7nm wafers needed for 5G mobile, artificial intelligence, or CPU and GPU technology.

The US controls the global ecosystem of advanced chips and could prevent Taiwan’s TSMC or Korea’s Samsung from supplying Russia. It would hurt over time.

But the semiconductor chain is notoriously complex and populated by middlemen.

Russia could fall back on China to supply microchips for its weapons Credit: Yuri Smityuk\TASS via Getty Images

“There would be all kinds of work arounds: Russia wouldn’t be able to get the cutting edge stuff but it could get by with intermediate chips for most of its weapons,” said James Lewis, technology director at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“They can always fall back on the Chinese, and this would dilute the sanctions. It would not be easy for Russia because you can’t just switch over. Everything has to be redesigned to accept the Chinese chips, and they’re not the best either. It would set them back two or three years,” he said.

Chinese companies were reluctant to breach US sanctions after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. It is a different world today. Xi Jinping has made it illegal for them to comply with US extraterritorial sanctions.

Even if the strategic deal between Russia and China at the Beijing Winter Olympics is overstated, Xi must have given Putin a green light of sorts over Ukraine.

Otherwise Russia would not have pulled most of its military forces out of the Far East to wage war in the West, leaving the Chinese border exposed.

Once you drill into the menu of western sanctions, it becomes painfully clear that the economic deterrent does not add up, either because the measures are less than they seem or because retaliation risk makes them unusable.

The Munich conference was a three-day obfuscation of this fact, a ritual of collective denial, a pretence that anything short of weapons for Ukraine actually matters.

The venue of Munich was all too fitting. The fate of Ukraine’s people is not so different from the story of the Czechs in September 1938.