Not sure. I found it via the reddit live thread which tends to filter for reliable sources but I haven't looked in any more detail
[live] /r/WorldNews Live Thread for the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
I read about six months ago that Russia was trying to expand military production, but they had a severe labor shortage. The pay in military production plants is not very good and Moscow wouldn't allow the plants to raise wages, so they had a lot of people work for a week and quit because the pay was bad for the amount of work required. Few plants were producing any more than they were at the beginning of the war.
The Russians have claimed tank production is way up, but when Perun did a deeper dive into the claims, most of the "production" was restoring old tanks taken out of storage. New T-90M production was about the same rate as it was in 2021.
Germany produced more tanks in 1944 and early 1945 than in 1939-43 combined, despite incessant bombing, loss of their ally Italy, etc. Russia has suffered almost no physical damage and has access to far more natural resources than Germany ever did. I fully expect their war production has grown and will continue to grow. All the more reason to stop all the foot-dragging and give Ukraine what they need.
Germany had a very well developed machine tool production capability. They were able to make the tools necessary to make weapons. As Allied bombing damage machine tools, they were also able to repair or replace them.
Russia has essentially no machine tool industry. They bought almost all their machine tools from Germany before the war and they have no access to those now. It's possible they have bought some machine tools from China, but China gets most of its machine tools from Germany and the United States too. China's machine tool industry is small.
Russia has a lot more oil than Germany had, and they do have a lot of other ingredients like iron ore, but they don't have the middle step industries to expand like Germany did. Germany not only had a well developed machine tool industry, they also were probably second in the world in metallurgy. Germany was able to produce high quality steel for guns and armor in quantity. The only country with more advanced metallurgy was the US. And Germany was ahead of the US in a few areas (they had some better specialty steel alloys).
Russia has almost no industry to make the alloys necessary to make high quality gun barrels. As a result their gun barrels are poor and wear out quickly. They only have a relative few sets of machine tools to bore out gun barrels and no access to more. Basically Germany is the only country in the world that makes the tools to bore large caliber gun barrels.
Germany was able to put slave labor from their newly conquered empire in their factories to make war goods. They also had a pool of skilled technicians to make the more complex parts.
Russia let their military industry atrophy after the USSR fell apart. They kept things going to some extent with foreign sales, but at a much lower volume than Soviet production. A lot of the Soviet production facilities ended up in other countries, a lot in Ukraine. Russia's education system has also fallen apart over the last 30 years. The last Russians to get a good comprehensive education are in their 50s now. That's the skilled technicians who are capable of making the more complex parts. The supply of them is diminishing and they are unable to train more because the kids coming along don't have the education.
The Russian production system has a lot of bottlenecks the Germans didn't have in WW II. The Russians probably have increased production a bit here and there, but I doubt it's booming.
Perun looked at the visually confirmed losses throughout the war. He pointed out if the Russians really were increasing production, we'd be seeing a lot of BMP-3 and T-90M losses. If Russian industry had completely failed we'd be seeing only old equipment. There are some losses of newer equipment indicating that Russia is making some new equipment, but the numbers of older stuff has been steadily increasing which is an indication that most of their losses are being replaced with older equipment from storage.
From the best hard data available (which isn't outstanding), the Russians appear to be making some new equipment, but losses are vastly greater than new production. They are limping along by tapping the huge inventory the USSR left behind, but the satellite photos are showing the reserve pool is shrinking fast.
