Russia Shows Off Latest, Greatest Military Hardware at Arms Expo

Microwave guns, acrobatic robots, and particle beams: It sounds like science fiction, but these are some of the gadgets among the military hardware unveiled at Russia’s annual four-day arms expo outside Moscow. Part arms bazaar, part marketing ploy, the exhibition is meant to show off the fruits of the Kremlin’s decade-long $700 billion military modernization project and to trumpet its self-declared return to the ranks of the world’s elite militaries. Though with falling oil prices and a depreciating ruble, the money needed for the vast project might run out first.

Still, Moscow showed no inclination for letting up at the military fair, rolling out the red carpet for its traditional hardware, including the T-14 Armata tank and the latest iteration of the Yak-130 fighter jet.

Russian officials also highlighted the military’s more unconventional technologies, including a super-high frequency “microwave gun” capable of deactivating aerial drones and precision warheads and which was unveiled behind closed doors.

The expo has also been a platform for Russia’s upcoming generation of military robots. Some, like the Uran-6 minesweeper, have already been field-tested — but others — like the anthropomorphic “Avatar” robot (shown in the video below at an earlier event operating vehicles and machinery in an obstacle course) are still a work in progress.

Domestically made drones are a key component of Moscow’s military modernization program, which aims to replace 70 percent of the Russian forces’ outdated equipment by 2020. The state-owned defense firm Rostec has taken up the mantle of Russia’s military drone program and has agreed to start supplying the military by 2016 with the first working models. In January, Rostec unveiled an amphibious, flying drone called the “Chirok,” which can carry bombs and land on water.

While the theme of this year’s expo is the Russian military’s cutting-edge technology, the event is also being used to ring the bell of Russian nationalism. On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke at the site of a new $360 million military amusement park that allows youngsters to play with military hardware and weapons. The expo also featured a reenactment of a World War II tank battle between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

The arms expo also featured plenty of other entertainment. Viewers were treated to flyovers, fighter jet acrobatics, and a “tank ballet.”

With tensions rising in the West over Russia’s role in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, officials from Moscow have not hesitated to use the expo as a bit of saber rattling. During his address on Tuesday, Putin said Russia would put more than 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles into service this year, a move announced after Washington proposed increasing its military presence in NATO states in the Baltics.

Questions remain over whether Moscow will be able to continue its program of military modernization under the weight of falling oil prices and U.S. and European sanctions, which were renewed by Brussels for another six months on Wednesday.

The Russian military budget jumped 32 percent last fall, only to be reduced by 5 percent this year in March. Yuriy Borisov, a deputy defense minister, told the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper in February that the military had underestimated how much it would need to spend to acquire the new T-14 Armata tanks, one of the flagship items in the Kremlin’s new military. The official cost of the tanks is secret, but cost estimates for the tanks are more than $7 million apiece. Putin has pledged the government would buy 2,300 by 2020.

But it is events such as the expo that make the political benefits of such a program evident: New military tools and gadgets make for excellent political theater.

Photo credit: VASILY MAXIMOV/AFP/Getty Images