So, it's obviously nothing like an across-the-board replacement, but you can make useful chips that aren't the latest and greatest.

If you want to do performance-competitive CPUs or competitive signal-processing for radars or whatever, then it won't work.

But let's say that you want to make a voltage-regulator chip (something that I know we have put on sanctions lists for Russia). Power supplies need those, so you're gonna pretty universally want them. That doesn't need to be particularly high resolution.

Think of all the problems that automakers had due to COVID-19 chip disruption. That was mostly over old, low resolution chips...but they had to have them to ship cars. The article specifically mentions auto manufacture.

Microcontrollers do a lot of work in consumer electronics. Probably have one in your microwave oven. Not very fancy, but it lets you plonk logic in in software.

Russia can probably smuggle in some chips. But that's expensive (because criminals are going to want a premium for their risk) and risky. Let's say that you're trying to buy sanctioned CPUs in Kazakhstan from sketchy parties.

Maybe one of those parties is a (comparatively) upstanding smuggler getting you the real thing and just charging you an arm and a leg.

Or maybe it's from some enterprising party selling counterfeits, because now the original manufacturer isn't gonna be working with you to verify that the stuff is authentic, and that knockoff doesn't have the same testing and has some problems.

Or maybe the person you've run into is with the CIA and intending to poison your sanction-busting smuggled supplies of chips with backdoored or sabotaged versions.

Russia will source what it has to from the black market, but the less stuff in their supply chain that comes from the black market, the better-off they are.