Why West can’t catch Russia’s gunpowder race?

For 500 years, the West has struggled to keep pace with Russia in producing gunpowder, the cornerstone of warfare.

Today, modern explosives and propellants fueling military operations are largely manufactured abroad, leaving Western nations short of key materials needed to fill shell casings. NATO allies’ ongoing ammunition shortages supporting Ukraine have escalated into a broader strategic concern, Caliber.Az reports via Ukrainian media.

“Putin’s war machine is accelerating, not decelerating,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said during a June 9 speech in London. “Russia produces in three months what NATO produces in an entire year when it comes to ammunition.” He warned, “Russia could be poised to use military force against NATO within five years.”

Ukraine has long relied on Western ammunition supplies since Russia’s full-scale invasion, but NATO’s attempts to increase production have lagged behind Russia’s rapid output. This imbalance has strained Ukraine’s defenses and revealed that critical defense manufacturing has been outsourced to non-allied countries.

Russia’s wartime economy enables faster production, compounded by looser environmental regulations compared to the US and EU. Producing the raw chemicals for guns, bombs, and artillery is a dirty, heavily polluting process—posing challenges for NATO countries seeking to reshore explosives manufacturing without major regulatory rollbacks or breakthrough technologies.

James McFarland of ChemRing, a leading European explosives maker, said, “Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we have seen unparalleled demand for our specialist energetic materials. Our Norwegian business... has been running at full capacity with a multi-year order book.”

Only a few European factories still produce basic chemical explosives, many repurposing civilian plants with historical manufacturing legacies. As Andrej Cirtek from Czechoslovak Group explained, “In Europe, starting production of explosive components from scratch is practically infeasible due to lengthy regulatory processes and limited availability of necessary technologies.”

The shortage of nitrocellulose—a versatile propellant base crucial to Russian firepower and Western supply chains—is central to the crisis. John Gray, a former US Army expert, noted, “Nitrocellulose is a monomolecular explosive... It's used in everything as far as ammunition is concerned.”

With key raw materials shifted overseas, notably to China—which supplies both nitrocellulose and cotton raw materials to Russia—NATO faces significant production bottlenecks. Ukraine’s own ammunition factories are vulnerable and limited, with many relying on small-scale manual production under threat from Russian advances.

The West is responding with massive investments. ChemRing plans a 275 per cent expansion in Norway, and Rheinmetall, Europe’s largest ammo maker, aims to restart military-grade nitrocellulose production by 2027. Yet for Ukrainians, such timelines offer little immediate relief.

In the US, BAE Systems operates the sole military-grade nitrocellulose factory and leads RDX production. BAE’s UK division is developing a novel RDX-based propellant that bypasses traditional plant-derived raw materials. Steve Cardew of BAE stated the new process “will use continuous flow processing to synthesise explosive material and remove the need for nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine.”

By Naila Huseynova