Russian missiles: 200 a month, and sanctions change nothing

According to Le Figaro, which cites a Ukrainian intelligence report made public on 4 November, Russia's defence industry is currently capable of producing more than 200 missiles a month, including up to 110 ballistic ones. The paper's headline speaks of a continuing growth in stockpiles despite international sanctions.

First caveat: this is a Ukrainian source, a party to the war. It has every reason to present the threat as massive, if only to argue for new Western arms deliveries. The report speaks of a capacity ("aurait", "would have"), not of verified output. We have neither the methodology, nor the detail on components, nor the share actually delivered to the front. Everything that follows is our reading, not an established fact.

That said, let us ask the awkward question: cui bono? A missile is a perfect commodity. It is produced, paid for by the state, consumed in a few minutes, and then has to be replaced. No civilian market offers such a guarantee of demand. When 200 units a month roll out of the factories, there are directors, shareholders, bureaucrats and subcontractors who find their account in it. Russia's military-industrial complex is not an accident of the war. It is one of its beneficiaries.

The report also raises an uncomfortable point for Western diplomacy: sanctions have not brought the apparatus to its knees. We were sold them for years as the "clean" weapon of the much-touted rules-based order. Yet a state that can levy taxes and steer its economy towards war production knows how to reallocate its resources. The state, Lenin reminded us, is first and foremost an instrument in the hands of a ruling class. Here it locks in budget priorities, and it is workers, conscripted into the factory or to the front, who pay in lives and wages.

It would nonetheless be lazy to look only at Moscow. The rivalry is one between power blocs competing for markets, resources and spheres of influence. Sanctions, arms contracts and military alliances form its political envelope, as our editorial notes on imperialism have pointed out. On the Western side, the race is the same: every announcement of an adversary's production justifies a further injection of credit, and the order books of European and American manufacturers fill up. Ukrainian intelligence sounds the alarm, defence budgets climb, share prices rise. Each side needs the other's enemy.

What we still do not know: the real state of the stockpiles, Moscow's dependence on foreign components, the rate of use on the battlefield. What we do know of the structure: as long as the war is profitable for a minority, talking about peace in terms of "support" and "deterrence" amounts to bookkeeping. The Russian and Ukrainian peoples, for their part, receive no dividends.