Exports of Russian weapons will have dropped by 93 percent in three years by the end of 2024, a defense policy expert has found.
The country’s arms exports have been falling since its President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and this year they have plummeted further.
According to news outlet Agency, Pavel Luzin—a nonresident senior fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA)—calculated that the revenue made by Russia from these sales will stand at less than $1 billion at the end of December.
It had been 14 times higher in 2021, at $14.6 billion, according to the post shared by Agency on Russian social media platform Telegram.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russian revenue from the sales dropped to $8 billion in 2022 and then $3 billion at the end of 2023.
Speaking at the online conference Country and World: Russian Realities 2024 on November 28 to 29, Luzin reportedly said, “We see that Russia, as an arms exporter, has generally failed.”
“It is clear here that the military-industrial complex is counting on stopping, freezing, ending the war in order to return to fulfilling export contracts, because they gave a good inflow, including hard currency,” he added.
Luzin said that the reason for the drop in sales was to enable Russia to produce more weapons for its own army, according to Agency.
In an article he wrote for CEPA in 2022, Luzin said that Russia “cannot fully replace” the weapons it was burning through during its conflict with Ukraine.
“The Russian defense industry will simply be unable to compensate for its losses in the foreseeable future. The Kremlin is adopting measures to restore some of its lost military power by giving priority to quantity instead of quality in its arms manufacturing efforts,” he wrote.
Earlier this year, data released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) showed that Russia had fallen into third place for arms exports—a first for the nation—on its annual update of the industry.
According to SIPRI, in 2019 Russia exported weapons to 31 countries whereas in 2023 it was only 12, as reported by Agency.
Last year, the annual update by SIPRI showed a similar picture of Russia’s arms exports, with its sales of weapons down by 12 percent—worse than in any other major nation that year.
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