NEW YORK, June 27. /TASS/. Russia has been able to ramp up its defense industry since the start of the special military operation in Ukraine, said US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns.

"That defense-industrial base is far stronger now than it was even in the beginning" of the conflict, he said in an interview with Bloomberg television.

The Royal United Services Institute earlier concluded that Western sanctions against Russia don’t produce a sufficiently strong impact on the country’s defense industry.