Global Arms Production and Ukraine’s Unpredictable Soviet Inheritance

Ukraine is very much a part of the global arms trade – both as a producer of components of military hardware, as well as a source of illicit weapons fuelling conflicts worldwide. The latter development has in fact become worse since the outbreak of war in the Donbass in 2014. Part of this connectivity to global markets is bound up in the country’s Soviet inheritance, a vast network of military-industrial facilities that underpinned defence production in the 1950s-1980s. The Soviets were then engaged in a power struggle with the West over geopolitical influence, military superiority and, of course, nuclear parity. A far less understood consequence of this focus on defence was its impact on Soviet politics, particularly the rising prominence of regional economic elites from southeastern Ukraine, who came to be disproportionately represented in the Kremlin under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. This article examines this inheritance in three parts. The first maps out how changing economic and security priorities after Stalin laid the groundwork for regional elites in Dnipropetrovsk, Kyiv, Donetsk, and Kharkiv to cluster in significant ways, fundamentally altering the political landscape of the Soviet Union. The second part examines how that landscape was changed by the dissolution of the union and independence in 1991, in particular, how denuclearization, reforms to the defence sector and privatization altered the relationship of regional economic elites to centres of power in Moscow and Kyiv and made the emergence of the oligarchs possible. The third and final part examine continuities between past and present as it pertains to the current historical moment, specifically lingering infrastructural concerns and conflicts of interest that precipitated a major conflict between the Soviet Union’s two largest successor states.