russia Has Positioned Itself As the Second-Largest Player in the Global Arms Market

The pro-kremlin centre for analysis of world arms trade (tsamto) has listed russia as the world’s second-largest arms exporter. According to its figures, in 2025 moscow allegedly sold arms worth approximately $15 billion, capturing 12.55% of the global market.

There is no evidence to support this figure. tsamto itself acknowledges that, since 2022, moscow has virtually ceased to publish data on the fulfilment of export contracts. Therefore, the $15 billion figure is not a tally of publicly disclosed deliveries, but an “expert” estimate based primarily on putin’s claim of foreign exchange earnings exceeding $15 billion.

To justify this figure, the tsamto also declared data on russia from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) to be “unverified”.

According to SIPRI, however, between 2021 and 2025, the volume of russian exports of major armaments fell by 64% compared with 2016–2020. russia’s share of the global market dropped from 21% to 6.8%.

The discrepancy between the two estimates is telling. tsamto relies on statements from the kremlin and its own assumptions – and arrives at a figure of around $15 billion for russia’s exports. SIPRI counts actual transfers of major weapons and records a fall in russia’s exports of almost two-thirds.

This is a familiar tactic for the kremlin: when the actual figures are unfavourable, they are simply replaced with the desired figures. This time, they have attempted to present russian statistics as an international ranking. But plucking a figure out of thin air does not alter the fact that russia’s share of the global arms market has fallen over the past five years to its lowest level in the entire history of such statistics, including the period when the ussr existed.