Russia’s arms sales last year were not affected by the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, a senior official said Friday, making it one of the country’s only industries to come out unscathed.
«Our order book remained at a level of $50-55 billion,» said Dmitry Shugayev, who heads the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation.
«We came out with a highly successful year,» he said on the Rossiya 24 news channel, adding that 2020 «was special» because of the pandemic.
Russia did however suffer losses in its so-called «secret» exports of arms and military equipment, falling 15.6% on the previous year, the RBK business daily reported last month citing customs data.
In 2019 and 2018, Russia received orders for its weapons worth $51.1 billion and $55 billion respectively, according to chief executive of arms giant Rostec, Sergei Chemezov.
The country in 2020 suffered losses in other key export industries, notably seeing a 12% drop in energy giant Gazprom’s exports to Europe with prices and demand collapsing due to the pandemic.
Russia did not reimpose a national lockdown when a second wave of infections surged late last year, which helped keep its economy’s contraction to just 3.1% — a relatively good result compared with many European countries.
Arms sales are a key part of Moscow’s push to increase its geopolitical clout from the Middle East to Africa.
Russia’s Life Expectancy Plummets in Pandemic-Hit 2020
Russians’ life expectancy plummeted in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic disrupted President Vladimir Putin’s goal to increase lifespans, according to state figures cited by the RBC news website Thursday.
Annual life expectancy dropped for the first time in 17 years from a record of 73.3 years in 2019 to 71.1 years last year, according to the cited preliminary figures. Russia’s state statistics agency recently announced 323,000 excess deaths in 2020, the highest in a decade and a half.
“The spread of the new coronavirus infection has objectively diverted Russia from the development trajectory aimed at achieving the 2018 national goals,” RBC quoted the draft government report as saying.
With adjustments for the pandemic, the Russian government now reportedly expects life expectancy to start inching up in six-month increments from 71.7 years in 2022 to 73.6 years in 2024.
Russia has earmarked 1.7 trillion rubles ($22 billion) on healthcare to meet Putin’s goal of raising life expectancy to 75.2 years by the time his current term ends in 2024.
According to RBC, the Russian government expects the country’s population to decline by 583,400 in 2020. It expects overall population loss to total more than 2.2 million between 2020-2024 before finally rising by 54,700 in 2030.
Russia’s official statistics agency previously placed the population decline at 510,000 people from 146.75 million in 2019 to 146.24 million last year.
