You're reading: Russia supplied $15.2 billion worth of weapons abroad in 2012

Novo-Ogaryovo (Moscow region) - Russia increased the export of weapons and military equipment in 2012, Russian President Vladimir Putin told the commission on Russia's military-technical cooperation with foreign countries on Wednesday.

“In December 2012, we had a tentative discussion on the possible results in the sphere of military-technical cooperation and reached an agreement to sum up the final results in 2013, after receiving all necessary data. Now we can really do it, and we can now say, like we said last year, that our work in this direction can well be seen as satisfactory: the increase has reached 12% and Russia’s weapons exports to its partner countries reached $15.2 billion,” Putin said.

“It’s one of the best indicators in this sphere, and we can say with all confidence that the Russian Federation is among the unconditional leaders in the sale of weapons and special equipment,” he said.

“The only country that’s close is the U.S. We have more than one fourth of the world’s market. I repeat, the U.S. is only somewhat behind,” Putin said.

“The other countries, our partners, sell much fewer weapons, although they have good technologies and they are no doubt leaders in terms of these high technologies, which, by the way, are used rather actively, primarily in the sphere of weapons production,” he said.

“Russian special military-purpose equipment is supplied to 66 countries, and we have agreements on military-technical cooperation with 85 countries, that is, we have prospects of developing relations with many countries,” Putin said.