After more than four years of war and sanctions, Russia’s defense industry is still producing weapons at scale. But counting the weapons leaving Russian factories captures only part of the picture. It says far less about what it takes to keep those production lines running. The more important question is what makes Russia’s mass-production model possible in the first place.
Trace the production chain backward, from final assembly to labor, machinery, components, imported supplies and ultimately financing, and Russia’s defense industrial base begins to look markedly different from what headline production figures suggest.
That wider supply chain provides a better measure of the actual strength, and the constraints, of Russia’s military-industrial system.
Mass comes at a cost
Russian military spending reached approximately 16 trillion rubles in 2025, equivalent to 7.5% of gross domestic product, or roughly €170 billion. Initial plans for 2026 allocated 14.9 trillion rubles, or around €154 billion.
That spending has sustained defense production, but it has also added pressure to an overheating economy. In 2025, Russian authorities maintained restrictive monetary policy to contain inflation, while the budget deficit reached 2.6% of GDP. Inflation exceeded 10% in early 2025 and the central bank’s key interest rate reached 21%, while growth in sectors outside the defense economy had stagnated since 2023.
This is where one of the first constraints on Russia’s wartime production model becomes visible. The defense industry does not draw on a separate pool of national resources. It competes with the civilian economy for the same workers, capital and industrial capacity.
That competition is particularly acute in the labor market.
Recruitment by the armed forces and defense industry, combined with emigration, helped push unemployment down to 2.3% by late 2024 and intensified labor shortages across construction, agriculture, transportation, healthcare and other civilian sectors. Defense companies can offer wages and benefits that many civilian employers struggle to match.
Alabuga offers an extreme example. An Associated Press investigation documented the recruitment of roughly 200 young African women to work at a facility producing Iranian-designed drones. Several said they had been misled about the nature of the work, their pay or the conditions they would face.
The case, previously examined here, is not representative of the Russian labor market as a whole. But it illustrates how far a priority defense facility can expand its recruitment pool, and the methods it can use, when domestic labor becomes a constraint.
Russia’s ability to increase military output therefore comes with a broader economic trade-off. More money and more workers directed toward defense mean fewer resources available elsewhere.
Yet even that mobilization does not fully explain the production volumes Russia has sustained. To understand what feeds its factories, the analysis must also account for what Russia inherited before the war, and what continues to enter its industrial base from abroad.
Russian weapons, foreign inputs
A significant share of the armored vehicles delivered since 2022 have not been entirely new builds.
In 2024, roughly 85% of the approximately 1,500 tanks and 3,000 other armored vehicles counted as Russian production were actually vehicles pulled from storage and refurbished or modernized.
That approach has an inherent limit. As the vehicles easiest to restore are consumed, those remaining in storage require increasingly extensive, and potentially more resource-intensive, refurbishment. But Soviet-era stockpiles are only part of the equation.
Western sanctions have complicated Russia’s direct access to some technologies and industrial equipment, forcing Moscow to rebuild supply chains around the restrictions. China has become central to that effort.
Russian manufacturers continue to obtain machine tools, industrial equipment and components required to manufacture complex weapons, notably through Chinese commercial networks. In 2024, Chinese suppliers accounted for around 90% of some categories of heavy industrial components imported by Russia, including computer numerical control machine tools used for precision manufacturing.
The significance goes beyond finding Chinese electronics inside Russian missiles or drones. China is also supplying parts of the industrial infrastructure needed to manufacture weapons in the first place. The same pattern is visible in Russia’s drone sector.
Russia has sharply expanded assembly volumes while continuing to rely on foreign sources for engines, avionics and microelectronics. Chinese electronics accounted for an estimated 60% to 65% of the components identified in a recent example of a Russian Geran-family loitering munition, while some engines and other inputs also came from China.
North Korea fills a different gap: ammunition. Between August 2023 and March 2025, 64 maritime shipments involving more than 15,000 containers may have moved between 4.2 million and 5.8 million munitions, primarily artillery shells and rockets, through the shadow fleet.
Those shipments help bridge the gap between what Russia can supply domestically and what a high-intensity war consumes. North Korean ammunition has consequently become an important factor in sustaining Russian artillery fire.
Iran occupies yet another place in the system. Cooperation on Iranian-designed drones evolved from direct weapons deliveries toward localized production inside Russia. Moscow was therefore able to absorb and industrialize a technology that originated abroad. The arrangement covering Russian production of Iranian-designed drones was valued at approximately $1.75 billion.
Russia has successfully integrated these external inputs into its war economy. But doing so also makes the limits of industrial autonomy harder to ignore: higher Russian output increasingly rests on resources, technologies and supplies that are not entirely Russian.
Sanctions evasion is now part of the supply chain
The continued discovery of foreign components in Russian weapons is often cited as evidence that sanctions have failed.
That conclusion misses part of what sanctions have changed.
Restrictions imposed since 2022 have forced Russia to rely more heavily on intermediary companies, third countries and indirect trade routes to obtain microelectronics, drone components, machine tools and other industrial equipment. In 2026, the European Union again tightened restrictions on entities outside Russia accused of facilitating the circumvention of export controls on these categories of goods.
Sanctions evasion has, in effect, become part of the industrial process. Russia remains heavily dependent on third-country suppliers to replace some critical Western components, while domestic substitution has not met all of its requirements.
This does not mean Russia can no longer manufacture weapons. It clearly can and in quantities sufficient to sustain the war.
The constraint appears elsewhere. Russia faces greater difficulty developing genuinely new and technologically advanced systems, particularly where scientific expertise, industrial capabilities and access to specialized components matter most.
Producing at scale, adapting quickly and innovating independently are not the same industrial capability. Headline production figures can blur the distinction.
The production chain starts before the factory
There is one more layer upstream: the money that finances the system.
Energy exports remain an important source of Russian government revenue, and changes in those revenues directly affect Moscow’s fiscal room for maneuver. Falling oil and gas revenues contributed to growing pressure on the Russian budget in 2025.
Russia’s so-called shadow fleet helps keep those revenues flowing by allowing Moscow to continue selling oil despite restrictions. By July 2026, the European Union had listed 632 vessels under its sanctions regime before adding another 41 ships and extending measures to companies providing certain services to the fleet.
The supply chain behind a Russian weapon therefore begins long before final assembly.
It includes the worker assembling the system, the machine tool producing its components, the foreign supplier providing critical inputs, the intermediary moving restricted goods and the export revenues that allow the Russian state to place the order.
Seen this way, production figures capture the end of the process, not the system required to sustain it.
Mobilization is not industrial autonomy
Russia has demonstrated a substantial ability to mobilize resources for war. But that performance depends on a system extending far beyond Russian defense factories.
This distinction matters when assessing the effectiveness of sanctions.
Russia’s ability to circumvent restrictions does not, by itself, demonstrate industrial independence. In many cases, it demonstrates the opposite: the existence of increasingly elaborate networks needed to compensate for capabilities Russia cannot fully supply domestically.
That makes Russia’s mass-production model both a source of strength and a potential vulnerability. Russia will continue to produce weapons. The more important question for the years ahead is what sustaining that output will require.
How much more will Moscow have to spend, import, circumvent and divert from the civilian economy to preserve the same level of military production?
The answer will be one of the key measures of the strength of Russia’s defense industrial base heading into 2027–2030.
