Sputnik
Vladimir Putin's victory will ensure Russia's economic rise and military-technical development amid the ongoing global geopolitical shift, Sputnik's interlocutors said, commenting on the presidential election outcome.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was successful in his re-election bid on March 17, securing a new six-year term, having gained over 80% of votes. Over the past several months Putin has outlined his strategy in a series of public speeches and interviews in which he reflected on what has already been done in terms of Russia's socio-economic development and what should be accomplished in the coming years.
Sputnik sat down with economic and military experts to discuss possible changes in Russia's policies over the next six years.
"The victory of President Putin is a determining factor given that under him [Russia] has built a [technological] chain that starts with research and development work and ends with the delivery of modern weapons and military equipment to the Russian Armed Forces," Alexey Leonkov, a military analyst and editor of Arsenal Otechestva (Arsenal of the Fatherland), told Sputnik.
"This work will continue, because, as the special military operation has demonstrated, [Russia's] enemy is looking for ways to beat its modern weapons systems. That is, they are looking for a universal means or, as they say, a miracle technology that will provide them, in their opinion, with a guaranteed victory in any military operation," Leonkov continued.
While delivering his address to the Federal Assembly on February 29, Putin chastised the West for attempting to drag Russia into an arms race, stressing that similar tricks were used against the USSR in the 1980s to facilitate its demise.
According to Leonkov, Russia won't fall into this trap again: instead of participating in the "arms race" the country has entered a technological competition with the West, outpacing the latter in several spheres. He particularly referred to Russia's hypersonic arms which are currently used in the special military operation along with new Russian-made drone swarms and electronic warfare (EW) equipment.
The Russian defense industry is due to undergo technological modernization related to the increase in size of the nation's armed forces up to 1.5 million over the next six years, as per the expert.
He particularly expects that a new generation of smaller hypersonic weapons will be built for the land, air and naval forces. The Russian Armed Forces are also likely to get more state-of-art S-500 air defenses, EW systems, high-precision artillery and munitions, as well as arms based on new physical principles.
Russia's military-technological modernization has been possible due to sweeping changes in the country's economic strategy under Putin's watch. Western sanctions have only facilitated Russia's industrialization and diversification of its trade relations with a larger focus on the Global South.
"Russia has got ahead of Germany in terms of purchasing power parity and replaced it as the fifth largest economy in the world," the president told Dmitry Kiselev, the director general of Rossiya Segodnya, Sputnik's parent media group, in an exclusive interview on March 13. He noted that "it's important that the structure of the economy itself changes, becomes more efficient, more modern and more innovative,” adding that he is planning to work on that if he wins the election.
In addition, Moscow and its partners have accelerated the drift away from the US dollar which has long become an instrument of punishment in global trade.
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