OREANDA-NEWS.   Vladimir Putin held a meeting to examine the situation with defence procurement orders, in particular, import replacement in the defence industry.

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA VLADIMIR PUTIN: Good afternoon, colleagues,

We met exactly six months ago here in Sochi for a series of meetings on carrying out the defence procurement programme, in which the Defence Ministry, commanders of the armed forces branches, top government officials and heads of the main defence industry companies and chief designers of our weapons systems all took part.

We analysed the state of progress at that point, examined the problems and looked at what we were doing right and where there were still issues to resolve. We agreed then that we would make the necessary effort to ensure that defence procurement orders are carried out in full and that the very large sums of budget money we are investing in our armed forces’ modernisation are spent effectively. I remind you that 20 trillion rubles [more than USD 576 billion] have been allocated [for modernising the armed forces] and 3 trillion rubles are being spent on modernising the defence industry companies themselves.

We agreed to meet in six months’ time to review the situation and see what else we need to do. We have new circumstances to address now – the need to replace imports. I asked the Government two or three weeks ago to have ready for today an overall analysis of everything related to this area and to calculate the additional funds needed and the timeframe in which we can resolve these new tasks.

As we discussed at a recent Government meeting, although this will require some extra funding at first, this is ultimately a step in the right direction and we need to do everything we can to have everything our defence industry needs produced here on our own soil, so that we will not be dependent on anyone else for any of the new weapons systems we are delivering to our armed forces.

I am sure that this will benefit our industry. Our design schools will also need to make the necessary adjustments to their work. We need to take a close look at the way work is organised in our research and development institutes and act in closer cooperation with the Academy of Sciences. In short, over these next three days, let’s work just as hard as we did last November and go over the whole range of issues.