Putin Tried for Years to Stop His Military From Using Western Parts — And Mostly Failed

Alberto Nardelli
·8 min read
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Even before sanctions cut off access to vital components and technologies for President Vladimir Putin’s defense industry, an internal Russian government review found years of attempts to reduce reliance on imports had largely failed.

Previously unreported assessments show a program with specific targets was put in place from 2019 to slash Russia’s dependence on Western parts for its arsenal by 2025 — everything from radar to advanced submarines to anti-missile defense systems. But an internal review of the plan 10 months before Putin invaded Ukraine found it was falling short on almost every metric.

Conversations with European officials including those familiar with the audit report highlight the protracted struggle by Russian companies and the trade ministry to move away from parts supplied by NATO member states and Ukraine. One of the Russian assessments explicitly warned the state’s defense procurement program could fail under a tougher sanctions regime, a European official said, asking not to be identified discussing sensitive matters.

Information on Russia’s challenges sourcing components has been shared among a number of Western governments and fed into the discussions on trade penalties imposed since late February.

Shortages of modern weapons have forced Russia to rely on models dating to the Soviet era, many of which are less accurate and reliable, according to US and European officials. They said the Kremlin is unlikely to be able to sustain the kinds of massive assaults on Ukrainian infrastructure seen this week, despite Putin’s threats to continue escalating.

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Russia is already struggling to resupply its troops on the ground, has suffered heavy losses of tanks and aircraft, and is burning through its missile arsenal, those officials say. In Russia, senior officials have repeatedly said they are able to resupply their forces in Ukraine and Putin on Friday said he had no regrets about the invasion.

Since the war broke out the US, the European Union and others have also hit Moscow with hefty sanctions, including penalties designed to cut off access to semiconductors and other key components used in high-tech weaponry.

“The costs to Russia — in people and equipment — are staggering,” Sir Jeremy Fleming, the director of Britain’s signals intelligence agency, said this week of the war in Ukraine. “We know — and Russian commanders on the ground know — that their supplies and munitions are running out.”

The import substitution program was set up in 2014 in the aftermath of Russia’s previous invasion of Ukraine, and accelerated with detailed targets set from 2019. But what has been described to Bloomberg as a 20-page audit by the office of Russia’s prosecutor general in April 2021 — covering a mammoth 177,058 components used in 278 types of military equipment — found widespread shortcomings. In 2020 alone, Russia had hoped for 18,047 substitutions covering 43 types of equipment but only managed 3,148 replacements across five items, the people said.

Kremlin officials have repeatedly said the import-replacement efforts across the economy have missed targets: Putin remarked in 2019 that, “in a number of cases as practice shows, obvious mistakes were made in the planning and organization of work on import substitution.”

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The trade minister was recently made a deputy prime minister, according to Russian state media, with greater powers to work on import substitution. The shortcomings have been discussed at meetings where public comments were made afterward.

Still, officials have said the efforts to limit reliance on foreign components allowed the industry to withstand the impact of sanctions imposed after the start of the war. “For some sectors, 100% import replacement isn't that significant or necessary. But here we need it,” Putin told a group of defense-industry executives last month, calling for ensuring it “as quickly as possible.”

The program for 2019 to 2025 aimed to swap imported technologies, electronics and essential goods for domestic equivalents or items produced from scratch, establish new supply chains and build a strategic stock of critical parts, one of the documents is said to show. A similar effort was established to replace nearly 640 components originating in Ukraine.

The inspection reported some limited successes, the people said. It found nearly all the goals for a small number of radio and laser reconnaissance equipment were met.

At the same time, the assessment showed that Ka-226.80 light, multi-purpose helicopters were allocated more than 230 million rubles worth of import substitution contracts, although they were not even part of the state arms procurement program. Efforts to produce analogue electronic components from scratch didn’t even get off the ground: Of the plan to develop 4,148 different analogues in 2020, Russia managed — none.

One European official said the expectation is for a further degradation of Russian equipment and its armed forces more generally. Some of Russia’s more advanced weapons are dependent on foreign components, such as cruise missiles, TU-22 bombers, submarines, the air defense system Nudol, and anti-aircraft radar.

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Last year’s assessment, which includes an extensive list of examples, also found that billions of rubles worth of contracts with Russian entities were running late, the people said. The relevant ministries were unable to control the process and foreign components, including chemicals, specialist materials and electronics, were being covertly used in a number of development projects, according to one of the documents they cited.

Authorities have clearly recognized the extent of the problem.

According to the Kremlin, prosecutors were assigned by Putin to monitor the progress of the program by 2018. Then-Russian Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika said in July 2019 that “import substitution in the defense industry remains a problem.” His successor Igor Krasnov said in 2020 that it was still a matter of concern.

The audit also inadvertently highlights the extent to which European companies had contributed to Moscow’s weapons stocks for years, including after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014.

The EU has since expanded its trade restrictions on Moscow. The bloc exported roughly 90 billion euros ($87 billion) to Russia in 2021, but nearly a third of that has been curtailed, with hundreds of items prohibited. Its most recent sanctions package includes prohibitions on several electronic components found in Russian weapons and aviation parts. The EU has also sanctioned semiconductors, quantum computing equipment and devices identified in Russian equipment used in Ukraine, as well as a few dozen individuals and entities linked to its military industrial complex.

The 2021 inspection includes issues with the following, the people said:

  • The anti-missile and ballistic missile defense system 14Ts033 Nudol, where 1,548 tasks to substitute components were set but only 0.3%, including the supply of spare parts, had been achieved so far. The plan was to replace 30 components with domestic analogues but that work had not started.

  • Early warning, long-range radar systems 1L119 Nebo-SVU and 55Zh6UM Nebo-UM. Work on replacing foreign components with domestic analogues had not started as of 2021, with targets to import spare parts met at 20% and 0.7%, respectively.

  • GT-01 Murmansk-BN, a communications intelligence and jamming system that Russia claims has a range of 1,000km. At least 111 of its components were from EU and NATO nations and needed to be replaced, while the development of domestic equivalents had not started.

  • Failure to meet targets for:

    • Yasen-class nuclear attack submarines, Russia’s quietest attack submarines, and older project 971M Akula-class submarines.

    • TU-22M3 bombers and Su-34 fighter bombers, alongside multiple types of missiles including guided air defense missile 9M96.

    • The IL-96 aircraft, a type of airplane also used by Putin to travel abroad.

    • Project 22350 class frigates, one of the more modern Russian vessels.

    • The air defense missile system Buk-M3.

    • Ka-52K attack helicopters.

    • Forpost drones.

The audit showed that nearly 100 contracts signed with Russian research institutes to develop domestic components since the annexation of Crimea had been delayed, the people said.

Attempts to replace Ukrainian components also underperformed in 2020, with 212 replacements on four types of equipment against a target of 260 substitutions for 12 types of equipment.

The same year, Moscow was able to establish a strategic supply of spare parts for just over a third of the 7,244 projects it had envisioned, the people said, citing the assessment. And of the 484 projects targeted for supply chain changes, only five saw progress.

“A reliance on Western components won’t stop Russia’s military machine but it will substantially slow down the pace at which Russia can regenerate military power,” according to Sidharth Kaushal, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.

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”While it can find its way around export controls through evasion or substitution with lower quality Chinese or domestic parts, this will introduce challenges in terms of the cost of securing components by more circuitous routes and the quality of substitute components when those are used,” he said. “This in turn will limit Russia’s capacity for building capabilities at scale.”

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