Evidence shows ‘hand to mouth’ production of Russia’s advanced weapons

WASHINGTON — The Russian cruise missile that slammed into a children’s hospital in Kyiv last month left behind clues about Russia’s defense industry after more than two years of war.

The missile, a Kh-101 filled with about 1,000 pounds of explosives, was made this spring before the attack, according to a report released Friday by a nongovernmental organization that examined remnants of the missile. That suggests Russian forces are using weapons like it as soon as they roll off the production line, the group said.

But it is also proof that Russia has continued to produce advanced weapons despite Western-led sanctions aimed at slowing their production.

The July 8 attack on the hospital killed two people and injured more than 30, including eight children, according to the hospital’s director. It was one of the worst days of violence against Ukrainian civilians in months as Russian forces targeted cities across the country.

The Kh-101 is the Russian military’s most advanced cruise missile, launched from bombers in Russian and Belarusian airspace. Ukraine has shot down many of them, using air defense missiles like the Patriot supplied by the United States and other NATO members. Some of the missiles, however, have managed to slip through Ukrainian defenses.

Parts of the missile that hit the hospital were examined in Kyiv on July 30 by investigators from Conflict Armament Research, an independent group based in Britain that identifies and tracks weapons and ammunition used in wars around the world.

The team decoded production markings on several remnants, which were collected by Ukrainian authorities.

“The missile was made in the second quarter of 2024,” Damien Spleeters, who leads the group’s operations in Ukraine, said in an interview. “So that means between April 1 and June 30, 2024, and given that the attack was on July 8, that means the missile was made between eight days and 12 weeks before the strike.”

Since November 2022, the group’s investigators have examined fragments from 12 Kh-101 cruise missiles and found that most of the weapons had been fired within about two months of the date they were manufactured. Two of the Kh-101s the investigators analyzed at the end of 2022 had been made in 2018 and 2019, but all of those they have seen since then were made just months before being launched — evidence Spleeters said could indicate that Russia’s military quickly exhausted its prewar stockpile.

Whether the sanctions imposed on Russia have succeeded in hampering its production of weapons is unclear, Spleeters said.

“It’s possible that they don’t have access to the components but have enough stockpiles to keep going in terms of production,” he said of Russia’s defense industry. “It seems they were still able to make the Kh-101 as they were before, but it’s a very hand-to-mouth type of production.”

“They make them and they use them almost right away,” he added. “And that makes them vulnerable to any disruptions in their supply chain.”

The Kh-101 first entered service with Russian forces in 2012 and has a range of about 1,550 miles, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

Conflict Armament Research has been traveling to Ukraine since 2018 to examine Russian weapons being used in the conflict.

Months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the group found that separatist fighters in areas occupied since 2014 were receiving shipments of weapons traced to Russia.

In June 2022, the group found that most of the electronics in Russia’s military hardware contained chips and semiconductors made by companies with headquarters in the United States and other Western nations.

Later that year, investigators documented how Russia used parts produced by Western companies to make relatively low-tech electronic components for its most advanced weapons, including guidance systems for the Kh-101.

Russia expended thousands of cruise and ballistic missiles against Ukraine in the first 2 1/2 months of its invasion in 2022, but after an initial flurry of attacks their use fell sharply, U.S. and British officials said at the time.

The use of top-line cruise missiles so soon after production probably indicates that Russia has to limit combat plans based on how many of those weapons its factories can make, Spleeters said, rather than having a deep enough inventory to choose targets based on evolving battlefield needs.

“When you want to understand the way that Russia wages war and their ability to continue to do so in the future, I think that tension between supply and demand is important,” he said. “And the fact that they use those assets on things like hospitals, whether that’s intentional or not, compounds the issue.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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