MOSCOW, December 7. /TASS/. Arms exports from Russia and China reflected in the reports of Western analytical think tanks like the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) are distorted not intentionally, but due to rising secrecy in both states, Director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies Ruslan Pukhov told TASS on Tuesday.

"In our country, we have started to classify our data substantially after the Americans imposed sanctions on us, especially over the past year, while SIPRI works solely with open data," the military expert explained.

This is one of the reasons why Western reports indicate that Russia’s arms exports are dwindling while China’s figures are, on the contrary, rising," he pointed out.

"It is awfully interesting how they gather data on China because the Chinese are also a very classified domain and a great lot of their machine-building enterprises are engaged in the defense sector solely to lobby their interests in the CCP CC [Chinese Communist Party Central Committee] while in reality, they churn out civilian production," Pukhov said.

In actual fact, "the entire global arms market, including the Russian segment, is on the rise," he pointed out.

"The Chinese [arms] exports are also growing, albeit, perhaps, not so intensively as SIPRI ascribes to China, and French exports are also on the rise - just look at hefty contracts signed for Rafale fighters. All arms exporters are expanding their deliveries. The arms market is growing and all weapons suppliers are boosting sales as well. India, which previously supplied armaments worth pennies, is now managing to export noticeable volumes, and Turkish exports are also expanding. Now, is the right time for arms sellers," Pukhov said.

SIPRI’s report

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute published its annual 2020 report on December 6 covering the sales of arms and military services by the industry’s top 100 corporations. The report demonstrates that the sales of the Russian companies included in the top 100 have been on the decline for a third year in a row. In particular, the Almaz-Antey defense manufacturer ranked 17th in the top 100 and the United Shipbuilding Corporation ranked 33rd have seen their sales dwindle by 31% and 11%, respectively, the SIPRI report suggests.

Director of Russia’s Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation Dmitry Shugayev said on December 6 that SIPRI’s methodology of analyzing the global arms market failed to reflect the real situation. He also accused the Stockholm-based think tank of churning out politically-motivated reports.

For its part, Rostec, Russia’s state tech corporation, underscored that SIPRI’s conclusions on dwindling Russian arms sales on the global market could not serve as an unbiased source of information. As Rostec pointed out, the institute’s ratings are based on dollar-denominated proceeds rather than on the quantity of tanks, aircraft, helicopters and other armaments and therefore it failed to reflect the real picture.