The Russian war in Ukraine is in full swing, with military budgets surging across NATO, Russia and beyond. In the space of barely a week, NATO’s arming of Ukraine has already moved on from tanks to fighter aircraft.
The tanks will start arriving in the next couple of months. Meanwhile, as last week’s column reported, Putin’s call-up is adding up to 300,000 more troops, many of them raw conscripts. Russian arms factories are reported to be working on triple shifts to keep up the flow of munitions, and while there may be problems getting high-tech components from abroad, Russia has plenty of capacity for producing basic materiel such as shells for heavy artillery.
On the NATO side, Poland has been given the go-ahead from the White House to buy $10bn-worth of multiple-launch rockets, including the HIMARS system, and is planning to build its own HIMARS factory. And Lithuania has become the third of the Baltic states, after Estonia and Latvia, to order the same system.
