MOSCOW. July 2 (Interfax) - The Russian defense industry's technological dependence on Ukrainian products will be fully overcome by 2018, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said.
"The Military Industrial Commission's board has developed and adopted a detailed import substitution plan at [President] Vladimir Putin's instruction. The first phase of the plan includes the compilation of a list of 186 specimens of weapons and military hardware in which Ukrainian components are used. And I can tell you that we will fully overcome technological dependence on Ukraine by 2018," Rogozin said at a 'Government Hour' hearing at the State Duma on Wednesday.
"The anti-Russian sanctions imposed on the Russian defense industrial complex and the disintegration of industrial cooperation with Ukraine have made it increasingly more relevant to overcome the Russian defense industry organization's dependence on supplies of imported components," he said.
The second phase of the plan includes the drafting of timelines for the replacement of the delivery of components from NATO and EU countries, he said.
"The work was so intensive that we even had to cancel the New Year's holidays at our Military Industrial Commission, because these timelines had to be adopted by mid-January," he said.
"As a result, with regard to NATO and European Union countries, the situation is the following: we will have to replace 571 specimens by 2018. This makes up 89% of the work that needs to be done. A total of 640 specimens of weapons and military hardware that depended on components imported from European Union and NATO countries," Rogozin said.
The main purpose of the import substitution program is not to copy the imported components but to build more advanced specimens, he said.
"This particularly concerns components from Ukraine, which cannot be called new items. Therefore, import substitution is not only the substitution of these products as they were manufactured and shipped to Russia, but the creation of more advanced specimens based on these analogues," Rogozin said.