Russian Military’s Next Front Line: Replacing Battlefield Equipment Destroyed in Ukraine
Russia’s heavy use and loss of weapons in Ukraine, combined with severe Western sanctions, will crimp its military might and lucrative arms exports for years, hindering its ability to produce everything from new weapons systems to spare parts for existing armaments.
Russia has also lost more than 3,000 pieces of large equipment in battle, according to Oryx, an open-source intelligence tracker. The tally includes more than 500 main battle tanks, 300 armored fighting vehicles, 20 jet fighters and 30 helicopters.
Russia in recent years has produced around 250 tanks and 150 aircraft annually, according to Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington. That means Ukrainian forces in two months have destroyed the equivalent of at least two years of Russian tank production.
Why there is unlikely to be a production surge anytime soon. If the war drags on and existing mothballed workable inventory of armor/munitions is exhausted, Russia will have a real problemIf the war drags on for months, consumption and destruction of Russian materiel, coupled with Western financial sanctions and export restrictions, will impede Moscow’s capacity to provision forces with better equipment, analysts say. Russian defense contractors will similarly struggle to meet demand from both Moscow and export customers, or to invest in research and the development of new products, say Western officials and analysts.
“Our sanctions have pulled back the military-industrial complex of Russia, and it’s not coming back any time soon,” said U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman in Brussels on Thursday.
So India's payment installments for the S-400 have been affectedRussia’s military-industrial sector has shrunk from its Soviet scale, further complicating a production surge like during World War II.
“We don’t have the men, we don’t have the equipment, we don’t have the components,” said a Russian military analyst.
The Russians like the Soviets before them do not believe in producing spare parts. This provides an answer as to why India has always had problems in securing Russian and before that Soviet spares for equipment.Hurdles even impede Russian defense exports that don’t rely on foreign inputs, due to sanctions imposed on Russia’s banking system. State-owned arms manufacturer Almaz-Antey said last month it was unable to receive roughly $1 billion in payment from clients, including India and Egypt, and urged the Russian government to help military companies by developing systems to process foreign transactions.
“Right now, because of the imposed sanctions, the processing of payments has stalled,” Almaz-Antey finance director Rustam Ulumbekov told Russia’s TASS news agency. “And the sums are colossal.” Almaz-Antey didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Spare parts could pose another problem for Russia’s military, since even noncombat military operations quickly wear through gear. Soviet industry focused on achieving production targets of finished products, from shoes to fighter planes, with less attention paid to ongoing support for the products. Post-Soviet Russia’s defense industry has improved only slightly, say people who have worked with Russian factories.
For parts worn out in Ukraine, “being able to replace them is a protracted operation,” said a former American military official with more than two decades of experience working with Russian military equipment, who didn’t want to be identified. “They have never manufactured spare parts like we do.”
