Ukraine ramps up spending on homemade weapons to help repel Russia

Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved– One emerging bright spot is its small but fast-growing defense industry, which the government is flooding with money in hopes that a surge of homemade weapons and ammunition can help turn the tide.The Ukrainian government budgeted nearly $1.4 billion in 2024 to buy and develop weapons at home — 20 times more than before

Yet like many aspects of Ukraine's war apparatus, its defense sector has been constrained by a lack of money and manpower – and, according to executives and generals, too much government red tape. A more robust private sector could help root out inefficiencies and enable factories to churn out weapons and ammunition even faster.

He is just one of many entrepreneurs transforming Ukraine's weapons industry, which was dominated by state-owned enterprises after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Today, about 80 percent of the defense industry is in private hands — a mirror image of where things stood a year ago and a stark contrast with Russia's state-controlled defense industry.

As impressive as Ukraine's defense sector transformation has been, the country stands no chance of defeating Russia without massive support from the West, said Trevor Taylor, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank. “We now produce in a month what we used to produce in a year,” said Vladislav Belbas, the director general of Ukrainian Armor, which makes a wide array of military vehicles.

Shortly before he was replaced by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine's former top general, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, highlighted the problem in an essay he wrote for CNN, saying Ukraine's defense sector remained “hamstrung” by too many regulations and a lack of competition.

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