The data of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) on the decline in Russian arms sales are not true. On Monday, December 6, military expert Andrei Frolov told Izvestia.
"SIPRI's assessment is not confirmed by Russian official data. If you look at the reports of Russian officials responsible for military-technical cooperation, you can see that there is no fall. In recent years, we have been working on a stable number of contracts. SIPRI has its own methodology for assessing the arms market, and it has been criticized more than once," he explained.
Frolov noted that SIPRI experts cannot know all the data on deliveries, especially news on new contracts. Also, according to him, there are questions about their assessment of the cost of a particular technique.
"For these and a number of other reasons, their methodology is speculative and has a remote relation to reality," the military expert concluded.
The SIPRI report, published earlier in the day, reports that the volume of sales of weapons and military services of the 100 largest companies in the world amounted to $531 billion in 2020, which is 1.3% more in real terms compared to the previous year.
At the same time, according to the institute, arms sales of the nine largest Russian enterprises of the Military-industrial complex decreased by 6.5% in 2020 compared to 2019 and amounted to $26.4 billion.
On November 2, Dmitry Shugaev, director of the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation (FSMTC), said that India, China and a number of other partners of Russia could become the first buyers of the new-generation S-500 anti-aircraft missile system (ZKR). In addition, he said that about ten countries are showing "very keen interest" in the purchase of the S-400 air defense system.
In August, Vyacheslav Dzirkaln, Deputy Director General for Foreign Economic Activity of the Almaz-Antey Concern of East Kazakhstan Region, announced that the first batch of S-400s would be delivered to India by the end of 2021. In February 2020, Russia began production of the S-400 for India.
