LONDON, April 4. /TASS/. In 2022-2024, Russia outpaced NATO’s European members in the production of weapons, the UK’s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) said in a report.
In the early months of its special military operation, Russia implemented what the British think tank called a well-developed plan for military-industrial mobilization and managed to significantly increase defense production. Ukraine, by contrast, drew on its Soviet-era assets to "regenerate industrial capacity," but it mostly relied on Western military assistance.
Meanwhile, Europe lacked a coherent strategy or understanding regarding its supply chains. This showed the weakness of Europe’s defense industry which proved unable to boost production volumes even though it had no lack of funds to do so. Protracted conflicts are won by the party able to generate new forces and the production of armaments, the authors of the report argue.
Whereas European countries could only "incentivize industry," they lacked proper systems for oversight of their defense complex, which led to competition between producers, overlapping projects and uneven expansion, according to the report. Russia, on the other hand, pumped additional money into military projects and also advanced preferential loans to defense companies, the report reads.
On May 25, 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that since the start of the special military operation, Russian defense plants had increased the production of missiles and artillery weapons by more than 22 times. On December 16, 2024, Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov reported that Russia spends 6.3% of its GDP and 32.5% of its annual budget on the military.
