Putin Appoints New Committee To Speed Up Production Of Weapons For Its War In Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin is reported on Tuesday to be creating and chairing a new committee with the goal of speeding up weapons production for the Russia-Ukraine war, as he and his regime is accused of drafting ethnic minorities to carry out the war.

The new committee, named the Coordination Council for Meeting the Needs of the Special Military Operation, was created by Putin as a way of accelerating that weapons are produced and delivered to the front lines of Ukraine, according to Euronews.

Russia’s military has been criticized internally and externally for the many issues that its weapons had, including the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War calling observing “the slower tempo of Russian air, missile, and drone strikes,” which Putin is reportedly addressing through this committee.

As a way of combating the decreasing amount of long-range precision weapons, Russia is also reported to have been using drones as a crutch to penetrate the stronger air defense systems that Ukraine has instituted.

The new committee comes as Putin and his government are being accused of disproportionately rounding up poorer Russians and ethnic minorities in the country and deploying them as soldiers during the partial mobilization started last month, Al Jazeera reported.

Ukrainian media and authorities have also reported that many of the soldiers committing war crimes in the country are minorities sent by the Russians. Victoria Maladaeva from the Free Buryatia Foundation said that Russia’s military went out of the way to draft these minorities despite them living in far-flung communities.

“They would never receive help because they are too far away. But with this mobilization, the government flew to these villages to get men drafted,” she said. “People see this as an injustice — that Putin is using ethnic minorities to fight in Ukraine for his imperial ambitions.”

In response to a possible increased amount of attacks against Ukraine, government officials in Kyiv are asking for more weapons and support from foreign governments to fight back against Russian aggression.

“We need more weaponry, we need more ammunition to win this war,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said. “We need tanks from our partners, from all of our partners; we need heavy armored vehicles, we need additional artillery units, howitzers.”