Russian arms exports have collapsed since Putin invaded Ukraine

Russia was once one of the world's largest weapons exporters but its arms business has been slowly drying up since Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops into Ukraine in February 2022.

The conflict that followed Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine shattered the global perception of Russia as a major military superpower and it has led to a sharp reduction in Moscow’s once thriving arms export business. 

Putin has had to turn to his Iranian and North Korean allies for assistance throughout the war in Ukraine, and in 2023 Russia was even surpassed by France as the world’s second-largest arms exporter. 

According to data analyzed by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIRPI) and published in March 2024, Russian arms exports fell by a staggering 53% between 2014-18 and 2019-23. 

“The decline has been rapid over the course of the past five years, and while Russia exported major arms to 31 states in 2019, it exported to only 12 in 2023,” SIRPI noted. 

India, China, and Egypt were the largest receivers of Russian arms from 2019-23, but there were also signs that these countries were reducing their reliance on the Kremlin. Indian arms imports from Russia were a prime example. 

According to SIRPI India is the world’s top arms importer but the 2019-23 period was the first time since 1960–64 that Russian (or Soviet) arms exports made up more than half of the country’s arms imports. That’s bad news for Russia. 

Russia used to make billions of dollars from its arms exports but that number has slowly dwindled at a time when Moscow needs an ever-increasing amount of cash to fund its ongoing invasion of Ukraine. But things may be more dire than they seem. 

Pavel Luzin is a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis's Democratic Resilience Program. He recently calculated in an article for the policy group just how bad the drop in Russian revenue from arms exports has been for Moscow. 

Photo Credit: X @pavel_luzin

Luzin found that Russian arms exports will have dropped by a whopping 93% in just three years by the end of 2024, a figure that represents the loss of billions of dollars for the Kremlin and its war effort. 

According to Luzin’s analysis, by the end of December, Russian revenues from its arms exports will only amount to $1 billion dollars. 

According to Newsweek, a post on Agency's Telegram channel noted Russia made $14.6 billion in revenue from arms sales in 2021. 

Newsweek also reported that since Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, revenue from Russian arms exports has slowly reduced. Sales revenue dropped to $8 billion in 2022 and just $3 billion in 2023.

If Luzin’s estimate of Russian revenue losses from its arms sales is correct, it would mean that the Kremlin’s formerly profitable global weapons business has all but disappeared in the years that followed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. 

"We see that Russia, as an arms exporter, has generally failed,” Luzin explained while speaking at the online conference Country and World: Russian Realities 2024, which was held from November 28th to the 29th according to Newsweek. 

“It is clear here that the military-industrial complex is counting on stopping, freezing, ending the war in order to return to fulfilling export contracts, because they gave a good inflow, including hard currency," Luzin added.

Whether or not Moscow will be able to recover its arms export business in the future has yet to be seen. However, it seems unlikely since several importers have moved away from Russia and sourced different options from the Kremlin’s global competitors.  

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