Russian arms exports have suffered a catastrophic collapse as manufacturers prioritise supplying weapons to the Kremlin’s forces in Ukraine.

Exports – which are a key source of much needed hard currency – have fallen by an astonishing 92% according to a defence expert.

Speaking at a conference in Berlin, Pavel Luzhin said Russian arms exports will have fallen 14-fold between 2021 and the end of 2024.

He calculated that Russia will earn less than US$1 billion (£791k) from weapons sales by the end of this year.

This compares to $14.6 billion (£11.6bn) the Kremlin made from arms exports in 2021, the last year before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Since 2021, sales have precipitously declined, falling to $8 billion (£6.3bn) in 2022, and $3 billion (£2.3bn) in 2023.

Luzhin told the “Country and World: Russian Realities 2024″ conference: “We see that Russia as an arms exporter has generally failed.

“It is clear that the military-industrial complex is counting on a halt, a freeze, an end to the war in order to return to fulfilling export contract, because they provided a good inflow of hard currency, among other things.”

The main buyers of Russian weapons in recent years have been China, Myanmar and India.

The Kremlin supplied as many as 31 countries with arms in 2019. Four years later, it was shipping weapons to just twelve.

It comes as Russian defence manufacturers face an increasingly uncertain future due to record high interest rates.

Russia‘s Central Bank has raised the key rate to 21% in an attempt to control inflation and has not ruled out further hikes.

Sergey Chemezov, the head of the state-owned weapons conglomerate Rostec, warned that defence companies could soon go bust en masse, if interest rates remain high.

He said that advance order payments only covered 40% of production costs and the rest, 60%, had to be borrowed from banks.

“If we keep operating like this, most of our businesses will go bankrupt,” Chemezov warned.

“Even arms sales don’t generate enough profit [to service debt at rates above 20%].”