Speaking with workers from the Tulazheldormash railway engineering plant on Tuesday, Russia’s president highlighted the “absolutely key” priority of ensuring Russia’s technological sovereignty, and striving for “100 percent” localization in the production of goods of “critical” importance.
“Where we see that it’s possible to establish stable, good, reliable relations with partners who really want to work with us over the medium and long term, we will cooperate with these partners, of course…But in critical sectors, of course, we must achieve full sovereignty, and in order to achieve this, we will work in several areas. We are already doing this, actually,” Putin said.
Import Substitution, Military-Style
This same logic certainly holds true for the defense sector, says Alexei Leonkov, one of Russia’s most prolific military analysts, and editor of Arsenal of the Fatherland, a Russian military publication.
“Our military-industrial complex (MIC) began a modernization and import substitution program in 2014. The majority of enterprises received targeted financing to renew their scientific, component and hardware parks,” the observer explained. “Enterprises received new machine tools, new equipment necessary for the manufacture and arming of military equipment. And many enterprises have managed to complete most of this program.”
Russia’s defense sector today accounts for between 2.5 and 3 million workers – or about 20 percent of all manufacturing jobs in the country. Defense factories specializing in nuclear weapons and rocketry, aviation, armored vehicles, ships and engine-building are sprinkled across the country, from Europe and the Urals to Siberia and the Far East.
Major defense holding companies and enterprises include Rostec, Oboronprom, Motorstroitel, Uralvagonzavod, the Izhevsk Machine-Building Plant, United Aircraft Corporation, Almaz-Antey, Tactical Missiles Corporation and others. Before the escalation of Ukrainian crisis into a full-blown Russia-NATO proxy war last year, the defense sector constituted a big chunk of Russia’s non-resource exports, bringing in close to $15 billion in revenue in 2021. This figure fell to about $8 billion in 2022 as the sector retooled and redirected production for the Russian military’s needs in Ukraine.
“In the framework of the special military operation, we’re talking about weapons and ammunition that are needed in a modern conflict, given that the theater of operations has been saturated with Western armaments. From the first months, the directions in which it was necessary to expand the production of weapons, ammunition became clear...And of course, this was also a question of technology, because military technology is always at the forefront of technological progress generally,” veteran military observer Alexander Mikhailov, chief of the Military & Political Analysis Bureau, a Moscow-based think tank, told Sputnik.
Successes at a Pace 'Many Did Not Expect'
While he declined to delve into specific figures, Mikhailov assured that the Russian MIC’s production of weaponry has increased “multiple times over” over the past year, while output of ammunition had jumped by “dozens of times” in some cases.
President Putin offered hints on the MIC’s output in a television interview in late March, saying that over the period that the US and its allies expect to send 420-440 main battle tanks to Ukraine, Russia will produce or modernize “over 1,600,” giving it more than a three-to-one advantage. “Russian production, the military-industrial complex, is developing at a very fast pace – at a pace many did not expect,” Putin said.
The arms now being produced by Russia’s MIC “fully meet the challenges” of the moment, and in many areas –such as military aviation, air and missile defense systems, Russia’s arms industry is ahead of foreign partners and adversaries alike, Mikhailov said.
Room for Improvement
Of course there is always room for improvement, the observer admitted, citing areas like unmanned aerial vehicles, communications systems, “and other military-technical innovations" that the enemy is now actively using. “But Russia is rapidly increasing its competency in these areas,” Mikhailov said.
Leonkov echoed these sentiments, saying the MIC has run into and had to solve a variety of logistical problems and headaches, both since 2014 and after February 2022. While some sectors have succeeded in replacing imports by 80 percent, others have done so by only 70 percent or even less. “But our factories are working, and the special military operation has served as an added impetus, because over its course various types of weapons and military equipment are being used; they need to be produced and the forces engaged in fighting need to be reequipped.”
“Obviously, Western countries, knowing about our use of some imported components, hit precisely at these weak points. Take for instance the aircraft industry and composite wings. We are now developing our own technologies, which will not only completely replace [Western ones], but make it so ours are even better than those from abroad. This is a tough job. It’s still in progress. But I think the result will be achieved. And, if the West suddenly lifted sanctions and said ‘let’s be friends, let’s trade again’, we will have no reason to do so,” Leonkov added.
Thanks, Sanctions
Leonkov believes that the West’s efforts to sanction Russia into submission, more than any other factor, will help assure import substitution and real independence in strategic sectors.
“I think some industry figures and officials thought that the West would come to its senses, that at any moment it would be possible to reestablish old ties. But the dynamics of international relations today show that this is unlikely. The West has clearly set a course for confrontation with Russia in all areas. All technologies related to metalwork, printed circuit boards, computing power, machines, equipment and so on – in these areas we were oriented on Western production. That is, we just bought the components and made something out of them. Now, we have made a turn to the East. And we’re not just buying something from China, but will be creating production lines that will allow us to replace all of this 100 percent.”
Today, the military observer said, direct purchases of components from the West are already virtually nil. “Now, the West, enacting its latest package of sanctions, will do even more to ensure that we cannot bypass them, make ‘parallel imports’ to receive the components we need. But we something to answer with – good [economic] links have begun to form in our country, trade with China has expanded. We can buy some things, but it’s better to be completely independent and produce everything in-house. And we are moving in this direction by leaps and bounds, with the main issue in the defense sector now being the expansion of production.”
Russia is unlikely to experience a return to normal relations with the West for at least the next 10-20 years, and the country’s leadership realizes this, Leonkov said. Therefore, Russia must learn to rely only on itself, he said, “because the experience of Ukraine shows that when a country is completely dependent on deliveries from abroad, it will always be in a vulnerable position which inexorably leads to defeat."
'Wonderful Phrase'
After Tuesday's visit to the Tula plant, Putin held a meeting of the Presidium of the State Council, where he started off a discussion on the development of Russian industry under sanctions by recalling what one of the people he spoke to at the factory told him.
“In the company we visited today, one of the managers, one of the owners of the enterprise uttered a wonderful phrase. He said ‘we were forced to switch to import substitution where we had not thought about it before’. This phrase ‘we were forced to’ is key...As things are, our colleagues are doing it, and it’s working out for them,” Putin said.