Putin tells Russian defence industry to up its game for Ukraine war

Dec 23 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin on Friday told Russia's defence industry chiefs to up their game to ensure that the Russian army quickly got all the weapons, equipment and military hardware it needed to fight in Ukraine.
Putin, who has cast Russia's war in Ukraine as part of an historic effort to push back against what he says is excessive Western influence over global affairs, made the comments during a visit to Tula, a centre for arms manufacturing.
"The most important key task of our military-industrial complex is to provide our units and frontline forces with everything they need: weapons, equipment, ammunition, and gear in the necessary quantities and of the right quality in the shortest possible timeframes," said Putin.
"It's also important to perfect and significantly improve the technical characteristics of weapons and equipment for our fighters based on the combat experience we have gained."
Putin said this week that the Russian army had to learn from and fix the problems it had suffered from in Ukraine, promising to give it whatever it needed to prosecute a war nearing the end of its 10th month.
Since tens of thousands of Russian troops swept into Ukraine on Feb. 24 in what Putin called "a special military operation", Moscow has ceded around half of the territory it initially seized.
It has lost or abandoned significant quantities of military hardware, and, according to U.S. officials, suffered tens of thousands of fatalities.
Item 1 of 5 Russian President Vladimir Putin, accompanied by Tula Region Governor Alexei Dyumin (L) and Shcheglovsky Val Director General Alexei Visloguzov (R), visits the Shcheglovsky Val machine building plant, a subsidiary of KBP Instrument Design Bureau, in Tula, Russia December 23, 2022. Sputnik/Russian Presidential Press Office/Kremlin via REUTERS
Putin has conceded that a mobilisation campaign to add around 300,000 troops did not go to plan and has ordered shortfalls, which have sometimes included a lack of basic equipment and training, to be urgently addressed.
Russia still controls a significant chunk of Ukraine however, and Putin has said that Moscow will prevail despite fierce Ukrainian resistance and Kyiv receiving billions of dollars of Western weapons along with military intelligence and other help.
He declared this week that the state would ensure the army's needs were met, with "no funding restrictions", but said there was no need to "militarise" the economy.
On Friday, he told defence industry chiefs he wanted to hear their proposals on how to iron out unspecified problems and wanted defence industry specialists to work directly with frontline forces to refine weapons and hardware on a regular basis.
The defence industry is under pressure to deliver.
A trade union leader in the Urals region told the TASS news agency last week that companies involved in defence orders there had moved to a six-day week with workers on shifts of up to 12 hours.
Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu on Friday visited the Kalashnikov arms factory in Izhevsk and told its director that the state would "significantly increase" orders from the plant next year, the Zvezda military news channel said.

Sign up here.

Additional reporting by Mark Trevelyan; editing by Jason Neely

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Purchase Licensing Rights

Thomson Reuters

As Russia Chief Political Correspondent, and former Moscow bureau chief, Andrew helps lead coverage of the world's largest country, whose political, economic and social transformation under President Vladimir Putin he has reported on for much of the last two decades, along with its growing confrontation with the West and wars in Georgia and Ukraine. Andrew was part of a Wall Street Journal reporting team short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. He has also reported from Moscow for two British newspapers, The Telegraph and The Independent.