Separately, during the pandemic, various companies bought various products, including washing machines, to extract the chips within, because the chips were the supply chain bottleneck, so it made economic sense to purchase them at even 10x or 20x the "normal" price.

But, I assume any company doing that in any kind of serious volume has some strategy for monetizing the "washing machine with chip excised" (?).

Also, my bike is VanMoof and they just went bankrupt, and it seems like "having inventory of almost-finished hipster e-bikes — EXCEPT those 1 or 2 key parts" was part of their fatal situation.

So I can imagine scenarios where you buy washing machines to extract chips to lose less money than you would otherwise.

They even stole tractors etc, https://www.itworldcanada.com/post/tractors-stolen-in-ukrain...

Washing machines etc could be on the sanctions list because they contain dual use chips, making them even more expensive to buy in Russia, but the troops are from regions where even the pre-war prices were prohitative.