SIRIUS /Federal Territory/, December 1. /TASS/. Domestic industry is compelled by the present situation to ramp up production of its instrument base because petrodollars can’t buy everything, President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday at the meeting with participants in the 2nd Congress of Young Scientists.

"I regret saying that we greatly depend - as high as 90% according to some data-on the foreign instrument base, and this is acutely felt in particular, under the current conditions. I reiterated, and I think you will agree with me, it is clearly impossible to work without an instrument base. It is also clear that intensively developing the internal instrument base should start eventually. While one can buy everything for petro-and gas dollars, from nails to diamonds, the point is that you will never produce anything on your own. That’s why the current situation pushes us to focus on plenty of areas, including the production of the domestic research instrument base," Putin said.

Grants are issued for institutions buying domestically produced instruments for research, the head of state noted. Such grants were given in 2021 if an institution purchased research tools with the share of Russian components of at least 10%, and 15% in 2022, he noted. Plans are in store to further boost this proportion to prompt customers to buy from domestic producers.

Putin supported the idea of creating an engineering center to deal with instrument maintenance materials, vowing to issue a relevant assignment to the Ministry of Education and Science. "As you know, generations of devices for scientific research change at a rate of about 3-5 years, and we need <...> to create a special industry, when we would have this replacement on a regular basis in a natural way," he noted.

"Nothing can be artificially wrapped up and closed forever in today's world, it's never going to work. Especially if we do something interesting, in demand and necessary, there will always be technological partners," the Russian leader assured.