Moscow. December 6. INTERFAX - The leadership of the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation (FSVTS) refuted the conclusions of experts from the SIPRI Institute about the decline in Russian arms exports.
"The calculation methodology used by SIPRI to estimate the sales volumes of defense companies is their own assessment, which, frankly speaking, does not reflect the real picture," Dmitry Shugaev, director of the FSVTS, told reporters on Monday.
"SIPRI uses only open data, which is certainly not complete. And such things as spare parts and services, they generally do not fully take into account. In addition, SIPRI employees are still representatives of Western institutions, and therefore they cannot do without a political component. This is the time," Shugaev said.
He also said: "Instead of the specific cost of the goods, they use the so-called trend indicator, which has approximately the same value for the same type of products. That is, the emphasis is placed on the evaluation of the quantitative side, which, as the institute itself emphasizes, cannot be used to estimate export volumes."
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported earlier on Monday that sales of Russian weapons decreased by 6.5%.
The institute's report says that the total volume of arms sales of the nine largest Russian defense companies in 2020 decreased by 6.5% - from $28.2 billion in 2019 to $26.4 billion in 2020. "In 2020, Russian companies accounted for 5% of the total global sales in the SIPRI Top 100," the institute's report says.
In October, Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov said that the volume of Russian exports of military products annually remains at a stable level - $ 15 billion.
Russia this year signed new contracts for the supply of weapons and military equipment worth over $10 billion abroad, Alexander Mikheev, head of Rosoboronexport, said in mid-October.
