Executive Summary
More than three years into its bloody invasion of Ukraine, Russia has transformed into a full-scale wartime economy. Despite sweeping Western sanctions, the Kremlin has maintained economic stability and redirected state spending into defence production, with military expenditure now accounting for nearly 40% of the federal budget.
While early hopes pinned on sanctions weakening Moscow’s war effort have faded, Russia’s GDP has rebounded, inflation-adjusted wages have risen, and the state has retooled its economy to support sustained conflict. China, India, and Türkiye have stepped in to replace lost European energy markets, while domestic plants from Tula to Tatarstan have resumed 24-hour production of tanks, drones, and artillery.
At the heart of this mobilisation is scale: Russia now produces 1,500 tanks a year, 250,000 shells a month, and dozens of drones daily. Military partnerships with Iran and North Korea have helped overcome sanction regimes, while materials continue to flow through third-party states. Satellite and mobile data reveal extensive factory activity across the country, suggesting a system that is not only surviving but thriving.
Russia’s ambitions remain expansive. With 150,000 additional troops deployed and intensified offensives in key Ukrainian regions, Putin appears determined to grind forward unless confronted with serious losses—military or economic. Peace talks remain unlikely without a shift in the battlefield equation. At the same time, Russian military infrastructure is expanding beyond Ukraine, with satellite evidence of new bases along the Finnish border.
As the West debates its next move, Moscow signals that this war is far from over.
Introduction
When Vladimir Putin appeared on Russian state television on February 24th 2022 to announce a “special military operation” in Ukraine, few expected the war to grind into a third year with no end in sight.
Since that broadcast, the UN has verified over 12,000 civilian deaths and nearly 30,000 injuries. The UK Ministry of Defence claims one million Russian military killed or wounded.
Meanwhile, the West has marshalled an arsenal of sanctions meant to cripple Russia’s war chest. More than three years on, the results are decidedly mixed. The United States led the charge with sweeping sanctions on Russian banks, oligarchs, and energy exports. The EU and Britain followed suit. Yet the coherence of this economic front soon began to fray. Despite pledges of solidarity, many EU states continued to purchase Russian crude and refined oil products, while remaining major buyers of pipeline and liquefied natural gas. According to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), although Russia’s fossil fuel revenue has dropped by more than a quarter since the invasion, China, India and Türkiye have eagerly filled the vacuum left by Western buyers.
This reorientation has cushioned the blow.
The IMF reported a modest 1.2% contraction in Russian GDP in 2022, a drop far short of early forecasts of economic collapse. In 2023, GDP rebounded with 3.6% growth, and further expanded by 1.2% in 2024. Western hopes that sanctions alone would sap Russia’s ability to wage war now look optimistic at best.
Part of the resilience lies in a wartime economic pivot. According to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Kremlin has turned on the spending taps. They are channeling state funds into defence firms, infrastructure, and generous handouts to households and businesses. The strategy has delivered: average nominal wages grew by 17.8% in 2023, with real wage growth of 8.7%.
Yet this boom carries the acrid smell of overheating. Nicholas Aucott, a British military advisor, warns that the Russian economy is “running in hot water”. Nearly 40% of public spending is now absorbed by defence. The Financial Times, not alone in its view, sees the Kremlin’s military largesse as a dark Faustian pact: buoying economic activity in the short term, while starving investment in health, education, and innovation.
That raises a broader question: does Mr Putin have a long-term economic strategy? Or is his merely a short-term appetite for militarised resilience?
Wartime command economies can rally for a while. But history suggests they are brittle. Russia’s may yet prove more furnace than forge.
How Russia’s military-industrial machine has been resurrected
That said, under the twin pressures of Western sanctions and battlefield attrition, Russia has pulled off what many in NATO capitals believed unlikely: the large-scale revival of its defence-industrial base. Soviet-era plants have lurched back to life. Production lines now run through the night, churning out tanks, drones, rockets, and shells in quantities that increasingly outpace Western equivalents.
This is not mere speculation. The Economist recently drew on commercial mobile phone location data, an unconventional but telling proxy for workforce concentration, to assess activity at key military sites. This, combined with satellite imagery and corroborated by defence think-tanks such as RUSI and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), depicted a defence economy running red-hot.
One standout is Uralvagonzavod, the state’s flagship tank factory. It reportedly produced 996 units over the past year. It’s a figure that dwarfs American output, which stood at just over 100 tanks in 2024.
The disparity is revealing. Russia is not pursuing next-generation battlefield dominance through technological sophistication; it is pursuing dominance through mass. Most of the tanks rolling out are refurbished T-72s and T-80s. These are platforms older than many of their crew and outfitted with reactive armour and, in some cases, rudimentary counter-drone systems.
Elsewhere, the Kurganmashzavod plant has reportedly seen a spike in labour activity, inferred from a peak mobile device count of 1,269. The plant is responsible for producing BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles, which have increasingly appeared in Ukrainian fields of fire.
A recent update from the Institute for the Study of War noted a surge in Russian mechanised assaults. These seems less a sign of technological superiority than of industrial momentum.
The West has so far failed to match this scale. While the US and EU continue to pledge support to Ukraine, their defence industries remain sluggish, hampered by peacetime procurement cycles and labour shortages. Russia, by contrast, has shifted into a wartime footing, albeit one that may prove unsustainable over time. And it’s a footing that is hard to work out intent behind. Does the Russian bear seek weapons in order to win the Ukrainian invasion, or are they producing armaments to take on NATO?
Commanding the Arsenal — The Men Behind the Machines
Russia’s military resurgence is not simply the story of factories roaring back to life or armoured divisions rolling across the steppes. It is also a story of the men who sit atop vast industrial empires and manage the logistics, contracts, and political alliances that sustain the Kremlin’s war effort. These executives and bureaucrats form a technocratic elite at the heart of Russia’s wartime economy, bridging the gap between state ambition and industrial execution.
At the centre of this network sits Rostec, the sprawling state-owned conglomerate that functions as the nerve centre of Russia’s defence-industrial base. With nearly 800 affiliated companies spread across 15 sectoral holdings, Rostec’s reach is unrivalled. Its CEO, Sergey Chemezov, is not merely a corporate figurehead but a confidant of Vladimir Putin.
The two men reportedly first met in the 1980s while working for the KGB in East Germany. Today, Chemezov oversees one of the most consequential portfolios in Russia: a conglomerate responsible for everything from rifles to rockets. Under his leadership, Rostec has grown opaque and vast, its financial records tightly held and its operations spread across aerospace, electronics, chemicals, and heavy machinery. Rostec’s own estimate of its 2023 earnings, some 2.9 trillion rubles, remains unverified due to the absence of a published annual report since 2021.
Beneath Chemezov is a cadre of loyal deputies and technocrats. Among them: Alexey Aleshin (First Deputy General Director), Vladimir Artyakov (First Deputy General Director), and Igor Zavyalov (Deputy General Director for Financial Issues). The rest of the board reads like a Who’s Who of the Russian state appatarus. Rostec’s supervisory board includes Denis Manturov, the Minister of Industry and Trade; Anton Siluanov, the Finance Minister; and a number of aides to the president. This meeting of state and corporate power is no coincidence: Rostec’s boardroom is as much a Kremlin outpost as it is a business hub.
At Uralvagonzavod, the state’s principal tank manufacturer, the connection to political authority is equally overt. The company is headed by Alexander Potapov, a senior official with the rank of State Counsellor of the Russian Federation and links to the ruling United Russia party. As noted, Uralvagonzavod has seen a major uptick in production, reportedly churning out close to a thousand tanks in the last year, mostly upgraded T-72 and T-80 variants. Potapov, a figure with extensive ties to the Russian defence sector, has presided over the plant’s 24-hour work cycles and its transformation into one of Russia’s most important war engines.
Another cornerstone of Russia’s armaments complex is the Kalashnikov Concern, maker of the globally recognisable AK-series assault rifles. Since 2020, the concern has been chaired by Alan Lushnikov, a former Deputy Transport Minister and now a private shareholder through TKH Invest. The company’s CEO and chief designer, Vladimir Lepin, remains under Western sanctions, accused of contributing materially to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Kalashnikov’s product line has diversified in recent years. It has expanded into drones, smart rifles, and maritime platforms, but it is the mass production of it’s infamous small arms that underpins its battlefield relevance.
Almaz-Antey, Russia’s premier producer of anti-aircraft missile systems (including the S-300 and S-400) is nominally supervised by the Federal Agency for State Property Management. Its chairman of the board is Mikhail Fradkov, a former Prime Minister and head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service. His son, Petr Fradkov, now chairs Promsvyazbank, a defence-linked bank under heavy sanctions.
Almaz-Antey’s General Director, Yan Novikov, is a figure of some controversy. Accused of dubious privatisation deals and surrounded by persistent allegations of mismanagement, Novikov nonetheless remains in post, presiding over a company that is central to Russia’s air defence capabilities. Criticism of the S-300’s efficacy by foreign militaries, including the Chinese, has done little to dent Almaz-Antey’s pole position in the Russian arsenal producers.
Other executives merit mention, even if they operate a little below the radar. At Rosoboronexport, Russia’s state-controlled arms export agency, there CEO Alexander Mikheev plays a crucial role in international sales, wheeling and dealing from Africa to Southeast Asia. At Kurganmashzavod, which produces the BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicle, Igor Giske has also overseen a sharp increase in production and workforce mobilisation. Tekhmash, a key supplier of explosives and munitions, is helmed by Sergei Rusakov, while the Tula Arms Plant (a producer of various small arms and launchers) is directed by Ilya Kurilov . Valeriy Dautov, currently serves as Chairman of Tula Armoury PJSC and also holds directorial positions at Tulamashzavod OJSC (since 2023) and Tulatochmash JSC (since 2020).
This nerve system of directors, technocrats, and bureaucrats permeates the anatomy of Russia’s reindustrialised war machine. They are not merely managers but participants in a national project of militarised resilience. Most owe their positions to political loyalty, state patronage, or historical ties to the Russian security apparatus. Few operate with transparency, and many more still remain insulated from public scrutiny by layers of corporate opacity and state secrecy. Penetrating that fog is almost impossible to the Western eye.
If Western governments wish to curtail Russia’s capacity for sustained warfare, targeting these individuals with sanctions is necessary but hard and, all too often, insufficient. As long as the industrial chain remains intact, all the way from its raw material extraction to the final assembly and export, new executives can be installed, fake companies set up and old patterns of production and sale will continue.
Disruption must go deeper. It must cut into supply chains, cross-border trade networks, and the informal economic conduits that feed Russia’s defence sector. The arms scalpel cannot be wielded lightly.
The New Drone Warfare: Iran’s Designs, Russia’s Factories
Russia entered the war in Ukraine with a drone programme that was rudimentary and ill-suited to the demands of modern conflict. Before 2022, its unmanned aerial capabilities lagged well behind those of Western militaries. In theatres such as Crimea and Donbas, Russian drones suffered frequent losses. They were victims of Ukrainian electronic warfare, nimble air defences, and their own limited engineering.
The invasion of Ukraine’s mainland in 2022 laid those weaknesses bare. Sanctions quickly compounded the problem. Russian UAVs, notably the Orlan-10, relied heavily on Western engines and circuit boards, many of which were no longer legally accessible. The Washington Institute notes that production stalled and performance suffered.
Yet, as the old cliché goes (or not), necessity is the mother of reinvention.
Deprived of components and credibility, Russia pivoted. First to Iran, and more recently to North Korea. One of the clearest indicators of this shift lies in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, where Russian engineers, with Iranian support, are now assembling the Shahed-136 drone, rebranded as the Geran-2. Satellite imagery and mobile device data suggest a sharp uptick in construction at Alabuga throughout 2024, accompanied by growing logistical activity at nearby Begishevo airport.
The results have been felt on the battlefield.
In February 2025, The Economist reported that Russia launched nearly 140 drone attacks per day, a volume that correlates with the expansion at Alabuga. These are not precision instruments but attritional weapons. It is war on the cheap: mass-produced but good enough.
Yet Russia’s drone strategy is not solely a story of mass production. Alongside the sheer volume of Shahed-style kamikaze UAVs, a quieter evolution is underway. It is one that speaks to tactical innovation in response to battlefield pressures. In recent months, Russian forces have begun to deploy fibre-optic-guided FPV (first-person view) drones on the front lines. These drones, tethered to their operators via ultra-thin, high-bandwidth cables, offer a critical advantage: immunity to electronic warfare. In environments saturated with signal-jamming and GPS spoofing (common features of the Ukrainian theatre) wire-guided systems allow for uninterrupted, low-latency control, even in the heart of contested zones. The use of fibre-optic drones represent an inexpensive but effective adaptation to a battlefield defined by electronic denial and rapid countermeasure development.
Unlike earlier drone deployments, which were often crude, vulnerable to interference, or reliant on imported electronics, these new systems are increasingly domestically sourced and tactically refined. Russian milbloggers and Telegram channels have shared footage of such drones being used in complex manoeuvres, from flying into fortified bunkers to striking moving armoured vehicles. While these innovations may seem modest compared to Western platforms like the Bayraktar or MQ-9 Reaper, their impact lies in context. They are easy to produce, hard to stop, and adaptable to a conflict where electronic dominance shifts daily. And they are cheap (at least compared to some missiles).
The emergence of fibre-optic drones also reinforces the scale-versus-precision trade-off that defines much of Russia’s strategy. Rather than attempt to match NATO’s technological sophistication, Moscow has opted for saturation combined with specific, low-cost innovations that undermine Ukrainian defences asymmetrically. In this sense, the tethered drone is more than a workaround. It is emblematic of a larger trend: the transformation of Russia’s defence-industrial complex into a machine capable of brute-force production and iterative adaptation.
Conflict Armament Research (CAR), a UK-based investigative organisation that tracks the supply chains of weapons, ammunition, and military equipment, has traced the origins of many of these drones. Their findings tell a story of hybridisation: recovered wreckage from Ukraine reveals Iranian airframes, Russian software, and Western components. Some smuggled, most likely, through China and Türkiye.
What they have found is clear. Sanctions may have slowed the flow, but they have not stopped it. So, if Russia’s initial failure was technological, its current approach is logistical. What it lacks in sophistication, it is making up for in scale. For now, the skies over Ukraine are increasingly filled not with stealthy spectres, but with swarms of slow, fixed drones, each one the product of a sanctions regime breached and a war economy retooled.
Explosives and Ammunition: Sustaining a War of Attrition
As such, Russia’s war in Ukraine is not being won with finesse. Instead, Vladimir Putin is wagering on mass: a grinding war of attrition that trades precision for volume. The strategy is simple. He will deploy troops in large numbers over time to overwhelm Ukrainian forces through sheer weight of fire. To sustain such a campaign, however, Russia must feed the front with an enormous and unrelenting supply of ammunition.
That necessity has forced the Kremlin into a full-throated embrace of wartime economics. Nowhere is this shift more visible than in the revival of its Soviet-era explosives infrastructure. Plants in Sverdlov, Selmash, Kazan, and Perm, many of them idle or underutilised in the post-Cold War era, are now pulsing with activity. Mobile phone location data suggests the Perm facility alone peaked at nearly 600 devices on-site, revealing the dense shift work required to meet production quotas.
Julian Cooper, writing for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), identifies these facilities as critical to meeting Russia’s current goal: the manufacture of 250,000 artillery shells per month. That figure, striking on its own, is reportedly being bolstered by significant foreign aid. The UK Defence Journal cites a NATO source who claims North Korea has shipped at least 6,700 containers of ammunition to Russia. Iran, for its part, has allegedly sent 300,000 shells.
The scale of this logistical operation is not speculative. Open-source analysis by Molfar, a Ukrainian intelligence firm, shows consistent rail traffic from munitions plants to western Russia. Increases in shift hours and overnight activity, tracked through fitness apps like Strava, point to factories operating on an accelerated cycle. This, more than two years into a war many assumed Russia could not sustain.
This industrial intensity carries strategic implications. While Western leaders debate the limits of support for Ukraine, Moscow has quietly built a war economy capable of outlasting not only its own inefficiencies but the patience of its adversaries. The question is not whether Russia can keep producing—at least for now, it can. The dark question is whether the West can match it shell for shell and, if in so doing, the war drags on and on.
Missiles and Rockets: Preparing for a Broader Conflagration?
Artillery shells are not the only weapons fuelling Russia’s war effort. Beyond the smoke and shrapnel of the front lines, Russia’s missile and rocket complex is also humming with renewed life. Facilities such as NPO Novator (producer of Iskander ballistic missiles), Titan-Barrikady (which makes mobile launchers), and NPO Splav (the home of Russia’s Grad, Uragan and Smerch rocket systems) have seen sustained activity since early 2024.
Novator, based in Yekaterinburg, recorded a peak of 1,564 mobile devices on-site—more than double its pre-war average. This surge aligns with a sharp uptick in Iskander strikes, particularly across the Kharkiv and Poltava regions in March and April 2025. Satellite imagery analysed by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) also confirms the forward movement of transporter erector launchers from factories to rail depots near Belgorod, just shy of the Ukrainian border.
The tempo at Splav, the multiple-launch rocket system (MLRS) plant in Tula, also appears to be quickening. New contracts are being inked at pace, some funded not through the central budget but by Russia’s regional governments. This decentralised procurement strategy is a clever circumvention of fiscal bottlenecks—dispersing risk and responsibility in equal measure, while sidestepping some of the scrutiny that comes with federal oversight.
The rearmament drive is not just a matter of money. It rests on three structural pillars that have allowed Russia’s arms industry to survive and, increasingly, thrive under sanctions.
First is labour. The Kremlin has tapped into its economic periphery, recruiting from poorer regions with promises of housing, cash bonuses, and wages well above the norm. The strategy has paid off. According to Rosstat, manufacturing employment in defence-heavy zones such as Tatarstan and the Urals rose 12% year-on-year-evidence of a redirected workforce marching in step with Moscow’s war priorities.
Second is supply. Despite embargoes, Russia still acquires critical materials. A joint report by the Open Source Centre and RUSI in 2024 revealed ongoing imports of chromite (essential for barrel manufacturing) and cotton cellulose (used in propellants). These are routed through ostensibly neutral states (such as Belarus, Kazakhstan and the UAE ), highlighting the porousness of sanctions regimes when economic self-interest is at stake.
Third is improvisation. Russia’s defence industry may lack cutting-edge innovation, but it has proven adept at adaptation. Iranian-designed Shahed drones and North Korean shells are now being copied or modified on Russian production lines. This hybrid model—fusing foreign design with domestic scale—allows Moscow to wage high-intensity war without full-spectrum technological autonomy.
It may not be elegant, but it works. In a war where mass often trumps precision, Russia has cobbled together a military-industrial base that is proving both resilient and resourceful. Western analysts who once expected Putin’s arsenals to run dry may need to recalibrate. The Kremlin’s factories are not running out of steam. If anything, they are just getting warmed up.
What’s next for Putin?
More than three years into its invasion, Russia continues to expand its military footprint across Ukraine. According to a recent United Nations press release, Russian forces are still active in multiple regions in places such as Sumy, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, and Donetsk. While frontline communities in the east and south endure the worst of the conflict, the UN notes that drone attacks have brought “death and destruction” to areas far from active fighting, targeting rural homes and critical infrastructure alike.
Moscow’s ambitions remain undimmed. At a military meeting on December 16th 2024, Defence Minister Andrei Belousov laid out Russia’s strategic aims for 2025: the full capture of the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Luhansk, and Donetsk oblasts. “In 2025, Moscow plans to achieve victory in the war,” he declared, according to The Kyiv Independent. By April 2025, the same outlet reported that some 150,00 additional troops had been mobilised, further bolstering Russia’s presence in Ukraine.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) offered a detailed assessment on May 11th, describing intensified Russian offensives in Donetsk Oblast (particularly in Chasiv Yar and Toretsk) as well as northern advances in Sumy and Kharkiv. Despite heavy casualties, Russia continues to recruit at a pace sufficient not only to replenish losses but to scale its force presence. ISW concludes that Vladimir Putin remains committed to a strategy of attrition, and will entertain peace talks only if confronted with serious military or economic setbacks.
So far, those setbacks have not arrived. The Russian economy, an economy now reshaped by war, has absorbed the shock of sanctions more deftly than expected. Militarily, Russia has demonstrated the logistical depth and political will to sustain long campaigns.
That has not stopped the speculation about what comes next. The New York Times, citing satellite imagery, reports that Russia is expanding its military infrastructure along the Finnish border, with new facilities under construction in Petrozavodsk and Kamenka. The Euromaidan Press has echoed these findings. The absence of official UN or NGO reporting on Russia’s Finnish deployments does not make the developments less real, only less acknowledged. It raises a broader issue: if international institutions struggle to keep pace with Russian military expansion, the burden of vigilance will fall increasingly on national defence agencies and independent observers like AOAV’s Explosive Violence monitor.
Taken together, these developments paint a bleak picture. The Kremlin is rearming, reorganising, and repositioning. Western sanctions have not forced a retreat. Battlefield losses, for now, remain within tolerable limits. Donald Trump and European leaders may call for peace negotiations, but the contours of peace remain remote.
AOAV urges governments, international institutions, and civil society to confront the growing threat posed by Russia’s re-industrialised war machine with far greater resolve. As the Kremlin shifts its economy toward perpetual war, sanctions and diplomatic warnings alone seem no longer sufficient.
Like we have argued for combating Improvised Explosive Device (IED) proliferation, a sustained and coordinated effort is needed to track and disrupt Russia’s military-industrial complex. Transnational supply chains, illicit procurement routes, and dual-use technology flows enabling this militarised resurgence all have to be targeted.
AOAV calls for robust investment in open-source intelligence, greater transparency in arms trade enforcement, and a renewed commitment to international humanitarian law. The failure to act decisively now will not only prolong the suffering in Ukraine but will set a dangerous precedent: that mass violence, if industrialised efficiently enough, can outlast international resolve.
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