Since Russia has its very own clone of the American-operated GPS, I’m having a hard time believing they don’t have a massive stockpile of the parts required to use it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLONASS

Sorry for your misbelief, but that is precisely why they need these chips. They have the satellites, but they can't utilize them without the chips.

The company mentioned in the article (U-Blox) makes said GPS modules, however there are many chinese clones of these. Some rebranded, some passed off as legit ones. They'll mostly meet the spec and sometimes lack a rarely used feature that the original does have.

The same happens with microcontrollers. Take the STM32F103 from ST Micro, before the chip shortages this was a chip you could find in in heaps of random low cost electronics that required a bit of smarts. Same thing happens there, there are some chinese clones that are cheaper and almost perfect copies. The "legit" sellers will sell these as GD32F103 or CH32F103 for instance, but if you try to buy a genuine part from a less trusty source there's a decent chance you're paying the higher prices for the same chip, just someone laser marked it as a genuine one instead to make some profit.

here is a 32Bit MCU, ARM Cortex-M3, for $0.08

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/New-Original-In-Stock...

This can probably run all the software needed for a simple drone, control, navigation, etc.

Here is an EU supplier:

https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Lumissil/IS31CS8977-QFLS...

They cost less than nails, how are you gonna track this shit?