Euronews fact checked the statement and found that ammunition production may have been approximately four times more than that of the NATO Alliance in 2024. On paper, NATO’s economy is 25 times bigger than Russia’s once again illustrating that GDP measure doesn’t tell you much of anything about the real economy.
Also, Russia never demolished their old war-production facilities. They just privatised a bunch of them, which meant that at the start of the war, when Putin realized that the war would drag on, he could just take back the factories and begin hiring people to work in them, which solved another of Russia’s chronic issues since the 1990s, which is high unemployment.
A lot of them did get demolished though and replaced with malls or elite housing.
Plausible. All i know is that at the start of the prolonged conflict, Russia’s justice department began a series of anti-corruption trials against the people who bought ammunition factories and more or less just declared the transfers of ownership to be invalid, and began making the factories produce stuff again.