This story is a part of the weekly newsletter about economy, defence, and tech in the eastern flank of Nato, How we cee it.
Global arms flows increased by more than nine percent in the five years between 2021 and 2025, reaching volumes last seen at the end of the Cold War.
The surge can be attributed to the eruption of the largest war in Europe since World War II, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, according to data released by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Ukraine’s weapons imports increased more than 120-fold in response, and now represent nearly 10 percent of global imports, compared with just 0.1 percent in the five years prior.
The 29 current European Nato member states saw their combined arms imports grow by nearly two-and-a-half times over the previous five-year period.
The United States remained by far the world’s largest arms supplier, with exports rising 27 percent over the same period, giving it a 42 percent share of total global arms exports.
For the first time in two decades, Europe received the largest share of US arms exports, nearly 40 percent.
Outside Ukraine, Poland absorbed the biggest share of arms imports of any European country, growing its share more than ninefold compared to the five years prior. Its two main suppliers were the United States and South Korea.
Poland and the Czech Republic are also among the central and eastern European countries that have broken into the top 20 global arms exporters. Poland accounts for just one percent of global exports, but its arms supplies abroad have grown more than 40 times compared to the period before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Czech arms exports are growing as well, though not nearly as fast. Up roughly two-thirds compared to the previous five years, Czech weapons output now accounts for 0.4 percent of global exports.
Both countries export primarily to Ukraine — 94 percent of Polish exports go to the country, as do nearly 70 percent of Czech arms shipments.
During the studied five-year period, the European Union ramped up efforts to harmonise member states’ arms export policies and strengthen the competitiveness of the European Defence Technological and Industrial Base. Taken together, arms exports from the 27 current EU member states rose by more than a third between the two periods.
Czech arms makers’ IPO made a bang, now it’s in trouble
Czech arms manufacturer Czechoslovak Group (CSG) has been capitalising on Ukrainian and European rearmament efforts for years. Its surging profits enabled the company to pull off the largest initial public offering in defence industry history, making its CEO and owner, Michal Strnad, the richest man in central and eastern Europe.
In the first three quarters of 2025, the group grew revenues by more than 82 percent to €4.5bn.
Riding high on ammunition demand, CSG announced last week, together with French Eurenco and the Slovak government, a €350m propellant powder production plant for artillery ammunition in the underdeveloped region of eastern Slovakia.
In early March, CSG also announced its entry into the Hungarian defence industry by acquiring a large stake in 4iG Space & Defence Technologies, and through it, Rába Automotive Holding. The initial investments include signed contracts for the production and delivery of thousands of military vehicles, as well as potential involvement in the HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) programme for Hungary.
But the good news ends there.
Last week, Czech investigative reporters from Seznam Zprávy confirmed what many in Slovakia have long suspected: that the ties between CSG’s ownership and Slovak defence minister Robert Kaliňák are uncomfortably close.
Kaliňák has been the right hand of prime minister Robert Fico for decades, serving three times as interior minister and currently as defence minister. Fico’s government has been awarding multimillion-euro contracts to the Strnad family’s businesses for years, and that trend has only accelerated since Kaliňák took over the defence portfolio in 2023.
Even during his earlier tenure as interior minister, Kaliňák helped vehicle manufacturer Tatra escape its financial difficulties in 2014 through a contract for 166 fire trucks.
Around the same time, Fico’s second government leased state-owned repair facilities in Nováky and Trenčín to Strnad’s father, Jaroslav — plants that Czech arms industry operators subsequently stabilised and that today rank among CSG’s most profitable assets.
Until now, however, the relationship between the politician and the Czech business family had never been concretely substantiated.
When CSG went public on the Amsterdam stock exchange in January, the company was required to publish extensive documentation about its operations. This gave Seznam’s investigative journalists the material they needed to uncover a hidden financial pipeline between Prague and Bratislava, specifically, between the investment vehicle FinGood, controlled by Strnad’s associates, and the law firm of Kaliňák. FinGood was making monthly payments to Kaliňák’s firm, Kallan Legal, ostensibly for “analyses of the Slovak market and its legal environment.”
The amounts reportedly ranged between €80,000 and €130,000 per year. Payments from FinGood to Kallan Legal are ongoing, though the current sums are not publicly known.
Those figures may seem modest, however, against the backdrop of the contracts Kaliňák has since overseen. His ministry signed two framework agreements, in 2024 and 2025, for the purchase of Tatra trucks totaling €1.7bn, awarded without a public tender. The vehicles are supplied by a company wholly owned by the Strnad family.
A parallel investigation by Follow the Money cast an even darker shadow over CSG’s public offering. While in the process of listing in Amsterdam, the company failed to disclose that its Spanish subsidiary, Fábrica de Municiones de Granada (FMG), had been blacklisted by the Nato Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA) the previous July, according to the report.
Under EU financial regulations, even the threat of a criminal investigation obliges companies to disclose the matter to investors if it is deemed material.
The NSPA itself sits at the centre of a major corruption investigation, with current and former employees suspected of accepting bribes. Kickbacks potentially worth millions of euros were allegedly paid by defence contractors or middlemen in exchange for contracts to supply the military alliance and its 32 member states.
In response to the investigative findings, CSG released a statement saying it had conducted a comprehensive legal audit of FMG’s business relationship with the NSPA covering the past several years.
The review, the company said, found no evidence of irregularities or any unlawful conduct in relation to the NSPA or any other public institution.
Saudi Arabia prepares huge Ukraine weapons deal due to Shahed threat
A Saudi Arabian arms company has signed a deal to buy Ukrainian-made interceptor missiles, the Kyiv Independent has learned. According to its sources within Ukraine’s defence industry, Riyadh and Kyiv are also negotiating a separate “huge deal” for arms that could be finalised this week.
According to a report by Axios, Ukrainian officials also attempted to sell their battle-proven technology for downing Iranian-made attack drones to the US last year, demonstrating how it could protect American forces and their allies in a Middle East conflict — but the Trump administration dismissed the offer.
That decision has since proven to be a miscalculation.
Iran has used the unmanned aircraft to bombard hotels and critical infrastructure in neighbouring countries that host US military bases. The cheap, slow Shahed drones have consistently evaded air detection systems, inflicting damage wildly disproportionate to their cost.
The United States and its Gulf allies have also struggled to effectively shoot down cheap, Iranian-made Shahed drones amid the Israel-US war against the Islamic Republic, deploying expensive interceptor missiles such as the Patriot to counter them.
Approximately 800 US-made interceptor missiles were fired in just three days in the Middle East — compared to roughly 700 Patriot interceptor missiles Ukraine spent over four winter months.
The heavy consumption of missiles worth millions of dollars in the Gulf is creating a shortage for Ukraine, which needs them to defend against Russian ballistic missiles.
To help reduce the cost of intercepting drones in the Gulf, Ukraine has dispatched interceptor drones and a team of drone experts to protect US military bases in Jordan, following an American request for assistance made last Thursday.