Loaves are not the only things coming hot off the production line at the Tambov Bread Factory in central Russia — and western sanctions authorities are taking notice.
Tambov’s bakers were put on a US blacklist in December for assembling small drones on the premises that Russian troops use in President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Their efforts have made the bakery a poster child for the Kremlin’s drive to engage civilian industry in producing for the front lines as the war increasingly dominates Russia’s economy.
In a state television report from the wholesale bakery, a factory boss showed off half a dozen Bekas drones next to an array of freshly baked loaves. “They even smell like fresh bread!” said Russian journalist Alexander Rogatkin holding up one of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and sniffing it.
The Tambov factory first began assembling the drones in February 2023 using a 3D printer that makes carbon frames, as well as antenna and camera holders, according to interviews with the bakery’s managers on Russian state media.
Most of the components for the Bekas are purchased online, allowing the bakers to keep costs between Rbs25,000 ($270) and Rbs50,000 per drone. Tambov now makes about 250 drones a month, as well as accompanying camouflage backpacks, according to the bakery.
Putin has framed the surge in defence spending as a breakthrough for Russia’s industry that has helped the country weather western sanctions during the war.
“The factories of Moscow, St Petersburg, the Urals, Siberia and the Far East — dozens of regions of our country — are working at full capacity in multiple shifts,” Putin said at a November event celebrating Rostec, Russia’s main defence conglomerate. “In today’s conditions this gives an absolutely unique impulse to develop high-tech spheres of production, not only in defence, but in related civilian industries as well,” he added.
War-related industrial output has risen 35 per cent compared with the period leading up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, while civilian production has remained flat, according to research published by the Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies. In some industries, such as electrical equipment and automotive manufacturing, the boost in war-related output has compensated for falling production of consumer goods.
More than 500 light industrial companies have switched to making equipment for the military, Russia’s trade ministry said in February 2023, adding that it expected them to produce four times more for the army that year than they did in 2022.
In Naberezhnye Chelny, a town in west-central Russia on the Kama river, an ice hockey stick workshop has switched to making bulletproof vests. A glamping tent company in Chelyabinsk, an industrial city in the Urals, is now producing sleeping bags and tents for the battlefield. In Voronezh, Russia’s southern farming heartland, an agricultural equipment factory is churning out everything from demining equipment and binoculars to anti-drone defences.
First-person view (FPV) drones have become increasingly important to both sides in the war, leading to more than 100 volunteer efforts focused on UAVs popping up across Russia.
Some of the newly minted drone-makers have said they were asked to pitch in by Russian authorities — the Tambov bakery’s owners have close ties to local government, while the baker in charge of the effort is a lieutenant-colonel in Russia’s reserve army.
“The Russian government has signalled its intent to subsidise drone production in the coming years. Chinese-manufactured 3D printers apparently retail in Russia for the rouble equivalent of a few hundred dollars,” said Allen Maggard, a Russian defence industry analyst at US think-tank C4ADS. “The combination of the low acquisition cost of 3D printers and the assurance of state subsidies might make transitioning to drone production an irresistible prospect for companies.”
Others, however, are amateur drone enthusiasts apparently motivated by a sense of patriotic duty, who share designs and specifications in groups on social media app Telegram and crowdfund to raise money for the FPV drones.
“What you are witnessing is a window into the whole-of-society, large-scale volunteer effort across Russia,” said Samuel Bendett, an expert on autonomous weaponry at the Center for Naval Analyses.
The Bekas drones’ small size means their combat potential is limited as they can only carry a 3.5kg load up to 5km. This makes them more suitable for anti-personnel operations than the larger Lancet drones, which are used to target Ukrainian armour and fortifications, or the Iran-made Shaheds deployed for strikes on Kyiv.
But the ease of producing the Bekas at scale — the factory claims to have spawned eight copycats — boosts Russia’s arsenal of kamikaze loitering drones significantly, Bendett added. “All of this obviously adds up.”
Even simple, low-cost weapons such as the Bekas drones are as reliant on foreign-made components as much of Russia’s high-tech military production, said Pavel Luzin, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington. “The only Russian thing there is the Bekas sticker,” he added.
The drones’ simple design and specification means tracking their supply chain is difficult: Russian customs records for the Tambov bakery and an affiliated company that produces the drones come up empty. Chinese 3D printers are particularly difficult to track because their components are usually shipped separately, Maggard said.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago, 22,531 shipments of goods have been sent to Russia from three Chinese 3D printer companies featured in Russian FPV drone communities on Telegram, according to trade data compiled by C4ADS, including 659 shipments with the keyword 3D, Maggard added.
Though the US sanctions designation is likely to limit the number of foreign counterparties willing to supply the Tambov bakery with components, the low cost and small scale of the operation means the company appears confident that the restrictions will have no effect.
After the decision, Valery Lyashchenko, the bakery’s chief drone builder, was shown on state television filling a box with bread rings and crackers before sending it off to the White House as a “thank you” to US president Joe Biden.
Yuri Chicherin, the bakery’s director, told the channel that making the US sanctions list was a major achievement: “We are proud, we are glad. When else would anyone talk about our factory at such an international level?”
