Source: Ukraine Makes Homemade Weapons, Needs More of Key Ingredient: Official – Business Insider
Ukraine is rapidly producing a variety of homemade weapons as its defense industry aims to meet the needs and demands of soldiers fighting on the front lines. But a senior official says Kyiv still needs more of a key ingredient to keep the arms flowing.
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine was barely producing any weaponry for its armed forces and was relying heavily on pre-existing stocks of Soviet-era supplies and support from international partners. Now, the country is cranking out its own drones, artillery, missiles, and more at a breakneck pace to supplement this inventory.
“I don’t focus much on thinking how we made it, but we made it,” Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s minister of strategic industries, told Business Insider last week on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Washington.
“We’ve got a few challenges, just a few. One is energetics — explosives and propellants — and probably that’s it,” Kmayshin explained, reflecting on Ukraine’s efforts to boost its defense output. “No one is making enough,” he said, and that is a global challenge. “So the more you get, the more ammunition you produce.”
Ukraine has received tens of billions of dollars in security assistance from NATO since the onset of the war, including more than $53 billion from the US alone. But as the conflict has progressed, the local defense industry has steadily contributed more and more of its own military hardware to Kyiv’s front-line forces.
These domestic efforts supplement the provision of foreign weapons. Kamyshin said Ukraine will always be reliant on Western support because there’s no one country that can outproduce Russia right now.
Russia also has weapons flowing in from abroad — most publicly from North Korea and Iran. But Moscow has also invested a significant share of its GDP into military spending and placed the economy on what experts say is a Soviet-style war footing.
乌克兰正在迅速生产各种自制武器，其国防工业旨在满足前线士兵的需求。但一名高级官员表示，基辅仍需要更多关键原料来保持武器供应。 在俄罗斯 2022 年 2 月全面入侵之前，乌克兰几乎没有为其武装部队生产任何武器，并且严重依赖苏联时代现有库存和国际伙伴的支持。现在，该国正在以极快的速度生产自己的无人机、火炮、导弹等以补充库存。 乌克兰战略工业部长亚历山大·卡梅辛上周在华盛顿举行的北约峰会间隙告诉《商业内幕》，“我不太关注我们是如何做到的，但我们做到了。我们面临一些挑战，只是几个挑战。其中一个是动能原料——炸药和推进剂——可能就是这些。”卡梅辛回顾了乌克兰为提高国防产出所做的努力。 他说，“没有一个国家生产足够多，这是一项全球性挑战。 所以你得到的越多，你生产的弹药就越多。” 自战争爆发以来，乌克兰已从北约获得数百亿美元的安全援助，其中仅来自美国的援助就超过530亿美元。但随着冲突的进展，当地国防工业稳步向基辅前线部队贡献越来越多的自己军事装备。 这些国内努力是对外国武器供应的补充。卡梅辛表示，乌克兰将永远依赖西方的支持，因为目前没有一个国家的产量能够超过俄罗斯。 俄罗斯还拥有从国外流入的武器——最公开的是来自朝鲜和伊朗。但莫斯科也将其国内生产总值的很大一部分投资于军事开支，并将经济置于专家所说的苏联式战争基础上。
