Russia scrambles to increase weapons production for Ukraine war

Putin has chaired a new committee focused on speeding up the production and delivery of weapons to Russian forces.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, facing military production delays and mounting battlefield losses, has urged his government to cut through bureaucracy to crank out enough weapons and supplies to feed his troops in Ukraine, where a Ukrainian counteroffensive has put Russia’s forces on the back foot.

The Russian military’s supply shortfalls in the eight-month war have been so pronounced that Putin had to create a structure to try to address them.

On Tuesday, Putin chaired a new committee designed to accelerate the production and delivery of weapons and supplies for Russian troops, and stressed the need to “gain higher tempo in all areas”.

Russian news reports have acknowledged that many of those mobilized to fight in Ukraine  – a figure the Russian president said was 222,000 out of an initial target of 300,000 – have not been provided with adequate basic equipment, such as medical kits and flak jackets, and have had to find their own supplies.

Last week, Putin tried to show all is well by visiting a training site in Russia where he was shown, well-equipped soldiers.

Other reports have suggested that Russian troops are increasingly forced to use old and sometimes unreliable equipment and that some of the newly-mobilized troops have been rushed to the front lines in the war with little training.

To substitute for increasingly scarce Russian-made long-range precision weapons, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence said Russia was likely to now resort to the use of a large number of drones to try to penetrate Ukrainian air defenses.

Agencies