Last week thousands of people visited a unique exhibition in Moscow’s Victory Park: Ukrainian military equipment destroyed and brought to the Russian capital as “trophies of war”. Favorites for taking selfies were a US Abrams tank and a German Leopard. Western tanks arrived in Ukraine with the aura of indestructibility, but Russian drones are putting them out of action.
It is a clear example that after two years of fighting the Russian army is no longer the one of 2022, forced to retreat after failed strategies and the need for Iranian technology to gain momentum in this new type of war with drones of the 21st century Russia has upgraded its military, is incorporating new weaponry and is ready to produce it as needed at the front.
To maintain the pace of the campaign in Ukraine, “it is necessary to increase the supply of weapons, military equipment and means of attack to the Russian troops”, said two weeks ago the Russian Minister of Defense, Sergey Khoigú, in a meeting of his department “State contracts have been signed with industrial companies, taking into account their capacity and a maximum reduction in manufacturing times”, he explained.
Russia has learned to develop new weapons and ammunition faster than at any other time in modern history, noted the US Secretary of State, Antony, at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), last month past As he explains, this production is so fast thanks to the supply of tools, microelectronics and optics, mainly from China.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on April 25 on German television that Russia is producing more weapons and equipment than it needs for the war against Ukraine. And this will allow him to fill the arsenals.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky complained a month ago that while aid to Ukraine is limited, Russia continues to have access to “critical components it needs to produce missiles and drones.” And it regularly implores its Western partners for anti-aircraft systems to repel Russian strikes.
The Brussels-based think tank has warned that Russian imports of Western technology, despite sanctions, have already reached pre-war levels. It gets it, according to an April 30 report, through its partners in China, Hong Kong, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, and also from the friendly countries of Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which facilitate trade and have increased their imports from the European Union in the last two years.
The American Abrams M1A1 tanks were apparently not as invulnerable as was thought in October 2023, when Washington confirmed the delivery of a battalion of 31 of these machines to Ukraine. Their superiority over the Russian T-72 was a great hope to make the contest fall in favor of Kyiv.
But Russian drones have found their weak point. Ukrainian forces are withdrawing them from the front line after the destruction of at least five, AP reported. As an American military told the agency, the surveillance capacity that Russia has achieved with its drones has also decreased the effectiveness of the Abrams in the open field.
The German Leopards have suffered a similar fate. Forbes reported in December that at least 11 of the 21 units sent to Ukraine have been destroyed or damaged. Now two of those unusable specimens are used in Moscow to increase the patriotic feeling of its citizens with the exhibition in Victory Park.
The new drone war, which Ukraine led in the first year of the dispute, has turned upside down. Russia has put money into its military industry and its production has already surpassed that of the enemy in quantity and quality of both drones and ammunition supply.
Aware of their importance as a weapon of the future, Putin said earlier this year that the front-line military needed more drones. And he announced that the country plans to train one million specialists in this technology before 2030. In February, during a visit to the companies of the Kalashnikov consortium, Xoigu said that from 2022 that corporation had opened new workshops to increase the drone production by 60%.
But it’s not just about making kamikaze attack drones. You also have to defend yourself against it. In April Xoigu announced the creation of a drone research and production center, one of whose objectives will be to equip Russian assault groups with small arms to “effectively destroy the unmanned aircraft of the enemy”. And in Omsk, during a visit to a tank factory of the Russian military industrial complex, the minister witnessed how the new models were being equipped with anti-drone inhibitor systems.
Russia has also managed to overtake Ukraine in tank production. The Russian Ministry of Defense has announced that by 2023 it had added more than 1,500 to support the campaign. Forbes reported in December that Ukraine had only 350, mostly modifications of the Soviet-made T-72.
The economic recovery after the first blow of Western sanctions and the military recovery feed back. “The unilateral severing of previous economic ties by Western partners aggravated many problems, but the most difficult period has already passed,” announced Russian Prime Minister, the technocrat Mikhaïl Mixustin, in September, whom Putin confirmed last week in his charge.
According to a note prepared by Renaissance Capital, “Russian growth is being driven primarily by military spending, which fuels the manufacturing sector and causes abnormal consumer activity.” The Russian State Statistics Service put industrial growth between February 2023 and February 2024 at 8.5%, and GDP at 7.7%, a sign of military Keynesianism.
Russia also surpasses Ukraine in recruiting fighters. Although the mandatory mobilization of reservists in the fall of 2022 that Putin ordered was very unpopular, the reality is that he added 300,000 men to his campaign. And since then the number of volunteers has grown. Putin assured his annual press conference that Russia’s armed forces had recruited 486,000 servicemen as volunteers, a route through which he assured that soldiers continued to arrive. The Ministry of Defense said 640,000 people serve under contract in the armed forces, and announced plans to raise the number of professional soldiers to 745,000 by the end of 2024.
In Ukraine, on the contrary, there is a lack of men. It had to pass a new mobilization law that came into effect this month, and last week Kyiv announced it wants to recruit 20,000 inmates from its prisons.
As American intelligence has suggested, after recruitment efforts and investment, the Russian military is “15% larger” today than it was two years ago. US Army General Christopher Cavoli, the commander of US forces in Europe, acknowledged in April that Russia has successfully rebuilt its military faster than Kyiv’s allies had estimated.
And it will continue at full speed for the rest of the year. At the meeting two weeks ago at the Ministry of Defense, Xoigu announced that in 2024 the army will receive the first S-500 Prometheus surface-to-air anti-missile systems, a new generation of the original S-300 and the improved S-400 with a radius of whose action reaches 600 kilometers. They will also have new systems of these two versions ie “Buk-M3, Tor-M2U systems and new generation radar systems”.
