It has been three years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the conflict has had a profound effect on the Russian weapons industry, causing its arms exports to plummet.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which researches conflict and arms, calculated that Russian arms exports decreased by half in the period of 2019 to 2023 compared with the previous five-year period.
Pavel Luzin, a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a DC think tank, calculated that Russian arms exports tallied less than $1 billion from January to December 2024. They had stood at $14.6 billion in 2021; they dropped to $8 billion in 2022 before falling further to about $3 billion in 2023.
Tellingly, France has surpassed Russia as the world’s second-biggest arms exporter.
“We see that Russia, as an arms exporter, has generally failed,” Luzin said in November.
The staggering drop in sales is partially the result of a shift by Russian arms manufacturers away from export contracts and toward producing more weapons for the Russian military fighting in Ukraine.
The Russian military has suffered very high matériel losses in the war.
The open-source intelligence website Oryx indicates Russia has lost 3,773 tanks, 1,933 armored fighting vehicles, 5,531 infantry fighting vehicles, 615 armored personnel carriers, nearly 2,000 artillery pieces of all types, and many other pieces of equipment.
Since the above are only the losses that could be verified via photographs or videos, Oryx estimates that true Russian losses are significantly higher.
Russian arms companies have been working overtime to replace them. (Moscow has also been tapping into its inventory of older, Soviet-era equipment, but Luzin wrote in January that 2025 would be the last year it could rely on stored weapons.)
Though the credibility of official Russian data is suspect, “production of new military equipment increased substantially in 2023” as a result of domestic demand, SIRPI said, with Rostec and Tactical Missile Corporation, Russia’s two biggest arms companies, seeing their combined revenues increase by 40% that year.
But that momentum may not be sustainable.
Increased production has put pressure on Russian arms companies, which face manpower and financial shortages and growing costs because of sanctions imposed by Western countries, Luzin wrote. They, therefore, struggle to keep churning out the necessary equipment and have largely paused foreign contracts.
It’s now a lot easier for this strategic island pulling away from Moscow to ditch its Russian weapons and buy American
Russian companies are also losing customers. In 2019, Russia sold weapons to 31 countries — in 2023, that number had fallen to 12, SIRPI found. This is a function of supply chains and geopolitics.
Since the purchase of weapons is often a statement of alignment, several countries that used to buy Russian arms have turned to Western, domestic, or other alternatives.
Additionally, because of sanctions imposed on Russia, maintaining Russian weapons is becoming increasingly difficult for buyers. Therefore, to safeguard themselves from uncertain maintenance, countries are seeking safer sellers.
In Asia and Oceania, which accounted for nearly 70% of overall Russian weapons exports between 2018 and 2023, the US is now the biggest seller. And in sub-Saharan Africa, where Russia used to be the biggest seller, the No. 1 spot is now held by China.
“Russia’s arms export categories in the last two decades [have mainly] included air defense systems, combat aircraft/helicopters and their parts (including engines), and some naval systems like diesel-electric submarines, corvettes and anti-ship missiles,” Luzin, who is also a visiting scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, told Business Insider.
These weapons, however, have been far from excellent, he added.
Research published in The National Interest indicates that China has begun challenging Russia in the lower-value end of the arms spectrum, what’s known as the “value arms market.”
At the higher end of the spectrum, South Korea has been making significant strides to Russia’s detriment thanks to its quick production times and NATO-compatible weapons.
Besides shifting the production focus of its weapons manufacturers, the war in Ukraine has damaged Russian arms exports in more ways, with some of the country’s more publicized systems (such as the S-400) proving to be more vulnerable on the battlefield than initially touted by Moscow.
Reputational losses are also influencing the downturn of the country’s arms exports, Luzin told BI.
Further, the dependency of Russian companies on “import electronics and machine tools on the manufacturing stage” has also had an impact, he added. Access to these components is harder to come by because of international sanctions.
And even when the war ends, things may not go back to business as usual for the Russian arms industry. Covering the lost ground will be “hard enough if not impossible at all,” Luzin said.
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