Russia will spend $2.7 billion on a programme through 2015 to boost the country's chemical industry, mainly serving the needs of defence, aviation and nuclear energy sectors, to end its dependency on imports.
Backing the plan, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said that Russia had lost vital technologies and production capacity to manufacture defence-related chemical materials.
"As a result, we found ourselves dependent on foreign suppliers in such a sensitive sphere as the defence industry," Putin said in his televised remarks.
He said the programme, which foresees the creation of 200 chemistry enterprises by 2015, would free the Russian defence industry from reliance on imports.
"One of the programme's priorities was to create laboratories and plants to develop and produce carbon-fibre composites that are used in aircraft manufacturing," a government source was quoted as saying by Izvestia daily.
Another senior official, who spoke to the Russian media on condition of anonymity, citing the need for secrecy, said that in the 1980s the Soviet Union and the United States were the leaders in composite materials research, but after the Soviet collapse most of the production facilities in the sector were left behind in Kazakhstan.
Under the programme, the industry and trade ministry is the main contractor for the Federal Space Agency, the Federal Agency for Science and Innovations and state corporations Rosatom and Russian technologies.
Earlier, visiting the Moscow-based Avangard plant producing a whole range of anti-aircraft missile systems, Putin announced that his government will develop another federal programme to support the production of components for the defence industry.
