Russia doubles military power to keep parity with Nato
RUSSIA has doubled its military capabilities in the past eight years in the face of a growing threat from Nato, its defence chief has said.
Relations between Russia and the West sank to a post-cold War low in 2014 when Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula following a hasty referendum and a clandestine deployment of Russian troops. Nato responded by boosting its presence along Russia’s border.
Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defence minister, told Moscow’s upper house of parliament yesterday that the doubling of the armed forces’ capabilities since 2012 had “helped to maintain strategic parity with Nato in the face of growing threats”.
Mr Shoigu also lauded Russia’s operation in Syria as something that had “improved” Russia’s standing in the world. His country’s support for Syrian government forces helped turn the tide of the Syrian civil war in favour of President Bashar al-assad. At the beginning of March, UN investigators accused Russian forces of targeting civilians in the country, a claim the Kremlin denies.
Russia’s military spending, at £51 billion, was the sixth-highest in the world in 2018, according to the Stockholm International Peace Institute.
Russia’s armed forces have commissioned 12,000 items of weaponry since 2012, as well as 1,400 aircraft and 190 vessels for the Navy as part of the army’s modernisation drive, Mr Shoigu said.
Russia will also soon start to mass produce its latest intercontinental ballistic missile, the RS-28 Sarmat, which can carry more nuclear warheads than its predecessor, the Soviet-designed Voyevoda, which was known as “Satan” in the West.
Overall in Russia’s nuclear forces, the share of modern weaponry is expected to reach 87 per cent by the end of the year, Mr Shoigu said.
Russia had been aggressively boosting its military spending in the past decade, mostly focusing on replacing Soviet-made weapons with newer models, until the defence budget dropped in 2017 as the price for oil, the backbone of the Russian economy, began to decline.