President Vladimir Putin said Russia has almost tripled its arms production to back forces fighting in Ukraine, though the military still lacks sufficient advanced weapons.
(Bloomberg) — President Vladimir Putin said Russia has almost tripled its arms production to back forces fighting in Ukraine, though the military still lacks sufficient advanced weapons.
“We have increased production of the main types of weapons by 2.7 times over the year and by 10 times in the most sought-after areas,” Putin said at a televised meeting Tuesday with Russian reporters and war bloggers. Still, “it became clear that we lack many things – high-precision ammunition, communications, drones. We have them, but we lack quantity,” he said.
While many defense factories were working round-the-clock to produce more weapons, “there is still a lot we need,” Putin said. “We need modern anti-tank weapons, we need modern tanks.”
He made the rare admission of shortcomings in production as Ukraine continues its counteroffensive to reclaim territories occupied by Russia. Putin railed against Ukraine’s US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies for supplying weapons to the government in Kyiv to defend against the February 2022 invasion, and insisted Russia would achieve its objectives.
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He repeated his claim that Ukraine hadn’t been successful so far in its counteroffensive, while acknowledging that Russia had lost 54 tanks in fighting. He claimed Russian forces had destroyed 160 Ukrainian tanks and had troop losses close to “catastrophic.”
After announcing a partial draft of 300,000 servicemen in September that helped spark an exodus of Russians abroad to avoid the war, Putin said there’s no need for now to order another mobilization. The army had recruited 156,000 contract servicemen and volunteers since the beginning of the year, he said.
Any decision on further mobilization would depend “on what goals we set for ourselves,” Putin said.
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