These guys at Aoav don’t understand a thing (or don’t want to).

The article does sound critical of rearmament, though looking at this website, a few weeks back, they had an article calling for rearmament and criticizing the limited scale:

https://aoav.org.uk/2025/putins-wartime-arsenal-inside-russias-re-industrialised-war-machine/

That said, under the twin pressures of Western sanctions and battlefield attrition, Russia has pulled off what many in NATO capitals believed unlikely: the large-scale revival of its defence-industrial base. Soviet-era plants have lurched back to life. Production lines now run through the night, churning out tanks, drones, rockets, and shells in quantities that increasingly outpace Western equivalents.

This is not mere speculation. The Economist recently drew on commercial mobile phone location data, an unconventional but telling proxy for workforce concentration, to assess activity at key military sites. This, combined with satellite imagery and corroborated by defence think-tanks such as RUSI and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), depicted a defence economy running red-hot.

One standout is Uralvagonzavod, the state’s flagship tank factory. It reportedly produced 996 units over the past year. It’s a figure that dwarfs American output, which stood at just over 100 tanks in 2024.

The disparity is revealing. Russia is not pursuing next-generation battlefield dominance through technological sophistication; it is pursuing dominance through mass. Most of the tanks rolling out are refurbished T-72s and T-80s. These are platforms older than many of their crew and outfitted with reactive armour and, in some cases, rudimentary counter-drone systems.

The West has so far failed to match this scale. While the US and EU continue to pledge support to Ukraine, their defence industries remain sluggish, hampered by peacetime procurement cycles and labour shortages. Russia, by contrast, has shifted into a wartime footing, albeit one that may prove unsustainable over time. And it’s a footing that is hard to work out intent behind. Does the Russian bear seek weapons in order to win the Ukrainian invasion, or are they producing armaments to take on NATO?

The Kremlin is rearming, reorganising, and repositioning. Western sanctions have not forced a retreat. Battlefield losses, for now, remain within tolerable limits. Donald Trump and European leaders may call for peace negotiations, but the contours of peace remain remote.

AOAV urges governments, international institutions, and civil society to confront the growing threat posed by Russia’s re-industrialised war machine with far greater resolve. As the Kremlin shifts its economy toward perpetual war, sanctions and diplomatic warnings alone seem no longer sufficient.

“The one who downvoted” didn’t downvote you because they think that Russia is in the right. I did it because you brought up brought up Russia when that wasn’t the topic at all, so no need to show me how horrible Russia acts, I already know.

The devastation in Gaza and Ukraine shows what that future looks like.

This doesn’t even look like they’re supporting Russia in the slightest.

I don’t completely agree with their position either, but if the “arms addiction” is the right move is a valid discussion to have. I’m convinced that Europe as a whole needs quite some investment for defense, but do we need to rely on US-made weapons so much for that, considering that most of theirs are also responsible for what’s happening in Gaza? Wouldn’t most of that money be better spent on research to develop our own alternatives to those systems? And do we really need to invest hundreds of billions of euros for that? How much of that money actually goes towards defense instead of offense? There are a lot of questions like these that we can talk about without distracting with “Russia bad” (which, again, I agree with), and I think this article brought up some good points to think about.