MOSCOW, April 09. /ITAR-TASS/. The federal agency for supplies of weapons, military, special hardware and for material delivery has reached a fivefold annual growth in the amount of Russian state defense contracts, head of the agency Nadezhda Sinikova told ITAR-TASS on Wednesday.

“A total of 1,376 contracts worth 380 billion roubles (about $10.6 billion) were concluded in 2013, their number has more than doubled on 2012 and their amount has increased more than five times year-on-year,” Sinikova said. As much as 5.4 billion roubles (around $151.9 million) were saved on contracts in 2013 that was much more than the indicator posted in the previous year.

The Russian Defense Ministry’s leadership decided to empower the federal weapons supply agency to place contracts not only within the country’s state defense order for military deals in a concrete year, but also on the whole scope of products made by the military industry for Russian Armed Forces.

“Changes in regulations of the Russian federal weapons supply agency are submitted for coordination with the country’s government. Other our contractors are the Federal Security Service, the Interior Ministry, the Federal Penal Service, the Federal Service for Control over Drug Circulation, the Ministry of Emergency Situations that increase the number of their orders every year,” the head of the weapons supply agency said. She noted that the amount of purchases planned within the state defense order for 2014 went up more than 30% on the previous year, “This is about one thousand product items for the tune of more than 140 billion roubles (around $3.9 billion) for the needs of the Defense Ministry and around 500 product items worth more than 4.5 billion roubles (around $126.5 million) for federal executive authorities.”

The state defense order volume for 2013 has reached 1.3 trillion roubles (around $36.5 billion) in terms of research-and-development projects, purchases of weapons, military and special hardware and repair, Deputy Defense Minister Yuri Borisov said earlier. Meanwhile, the state defense order volume for 2013 has exceeded 1.4 times that in 2012. The deputy defense minister noted that now “industrial capacities of enterprises in the military and industrial sector and observance of ecological cycle of weapons production are prioritised.”

The Defense Ministry noted that around 16.000 types of weapons and special hardware were delivered to Russian troops and more than 4.000 units were repaired within the state defense order in 2013. The ministry will begin to buy a promising multiservice self-propelled artillery system Koalitsiya-SV soon, tactical ballistic missile systems Iskander, self-propelled artillery systems Msta-S, Tornado-G, self-propelled anti-tank missile systems Khrizantema are planned to be commissioned, purchases of highly mobile modular platforms Taifun-K, Taifun-U, Platforma-O, Arktika are being prepared.

The country’s government mulls urgent steps for import substitution and launching production at Russian military enterprises.