The Soviet Union churned out vast quantities of military hardware for its Warsaw Pact allies and post-Cold War Russia remained one of the world’s top arms exporters, but now the Kremlin is forced to look to rogue states, including North Korea and Iran, for help resupplying its strapped forces in the troubled 6-month-old invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
On Tuesday, Pentagon and U.S. intelligence officials confirmed news reports that the Russian Defense Ministry had approached North Korea for rockets and artillery shells. A Defense Department spokesman said he couldn’t provide more details about Moscow’s potential deal with Pyongyang. The move follows an agreement the Kremlin signed to buy “hundreds” of Iranian Mohajer-6 and Shahed series military drones to help replace the fleets lost in the skies over Ukraine.
“It does demonstrate and is indicative of the situation that Russia finds itself in terms of its logistics and sustainment capabilities,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder told Pentagon reporters. “We assess that things are not going well on that front for Russia. It’s a sign that they’re having some challenges on the sustainment front.”
Pavel K. Baev, a longtime observer of the Russian military for the Jamestown Foundation, said “the volume of [Russian military] expenditure of key assets, particularly long-range missiles, during the six months of heavy fighting exceeds the Russian defense-industrial complex’s capacity to adequately replace the supplies.”
According to Ukrainian estimates that cannot be independently verified, Russia has lost more than 2,000 tanks and 4,000 armored personnel carriers, along with hundreds of aircraft, helicopters and rocket launchers, since the start of the invasion in February. Although it has long ranked as the world’s second-largest arms exporter, after the United States, Russia’s stock of firepower for its own armies is facing apparent severe depletions on the battlefields of Ukraine every day.
Analysts say Russia’s ability to replace the damaged and destroyed military vehicles is severely hampered by international sanctions put into place after the invasion, in particular on Western high-tech components that are critical to today’s munitions and supplies. Their arms industry produced about 250 tanks annually before the war, according to the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
“However, Russia is no longer producing tanks at that level,” said a statement by Mark Green, president of the Wilson Center. “As Western sanctions choke Russia’s access to high-tech components and other goods, auto manufacturing plants and other factories essential to military operations are closing down.”
Foreign Policy.com reported last month that Russia has severely curtailed planned arms sales to longtime buyers across Africa, in part because the weapons are badly needed closer to home. “We anticipate that they’re going to have a real problem delivering equipment at the rate they’re losing equipment in Ukraine,” an unidentified senior U.S. intelligence official told the website.
Officials in Ukraine have ridiculed Russia’s attempt to secure ammunition from North Korea. The country’s defense ministry said Kyiv is moving to adopt military hardware that meets NATO standards because Soviet-era weapons “have indeed exhausted their potential.” The Russians don’t have the same option, the Ukrainians said, and have had to go elsewhere for supplies.
“Those who are unable to transform to NATO standards switch to North Korean standards, be it weapons, politics [or] standard of living,” Ukraine defense officials wrote in a Twitter message after news of the Russian outreach to Pyongyang was released.
Starved for technology
Analysts say some high-tech Russian weapons are highly dependent on foreign technology and therefore difficult to replace while the country is under import sanctions. Since the start of the war, Ukrainian military troops recovered dozens of Russian cruise missiles and air defense systems that rely heavily on Western components, according to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a London-based think tank.
RUSI was able to identify at least 450 unique microelectronic components inside the systems that were produced by companies based in the U.S., Europe and East Asia.
“The preponderance of foreign-made components inside these systems reveals that Russia’s war machine is heavily reliant on imports of sophisticated microelectronics to operate efficiently,” RUSI said in a recent analysis. “This is despite persistent efforts by the Russian government to replace imports — in all aspects of its economy, including the military sector — with domestically produced materials in order to withstand international sanctions.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has not been the lightning victory the Kremlin anticipated, and the country’s military has been forced to use up large quantities of its weapons and equipment for only modest gains as a war of attrition grinds on. Analysts say Moscow doesn’t have a clear alternative to domestically producing microelectronic components.
“The country may have to either design or produce less capable replacements or engage in sanctions evasion activities to acquire the necessary components,” RUSI said in its report.
The drone agreement with Iran is another sign of Russia’s stressed supply lines. Unmanned aerial vehicles are capable of carrying precision-guided munitions and can be used for surveillance missions on the battlefield.
In addition to weapons and ammunition, Russia’s military also lacks soldiers to continue its operations in Ukraine. Officials in Kyiv said more than 50,000 troops have been killed since the invasion began. Pentagon officials are more circumspect and estimate that Russia has 70,000 to 80,000 either killed or wounded in action.
Filling the ranks has become a growing headache for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Putin’s recent order to increase the size of the military by 137,000 troops before the end of the year is unlikely to be successful because the Russian military historically has not met personnel targets. About a quarter of Russian soldiers were conscripted and the remainder were professional soldiers before the invasion, Pentagon officials said.
Despite his iron grip on power in the Kremlin, analysts say, Mr. Putin is hesitant to order a full-scale military draft and mobilization for fear of a popular backlash. Even so, the military has been attempting to expand its recruitment efforts.
“They’ve done this in part by eliminating the upper age limit for new recruits, and also by recruiting prisoners,” a senior Defense Department official said last month. “Many of these new recruits have been observed as older, unfit and ill-trained.”