Rosstat

Rosstat (Federal'naya sluzhba gosudarstvennoy statistiki) is Russia's central government statistics agency, responsible for tracking economic output across all sectors. Its April 2026 data, analysed by Bloomberg and reported by the Moscow Times, showed combined aircraft and drone production 117% higher year-on-year, with a January-April 2026 average of 78% against a full-year 2025 figure of 68%. Rosstat published no absolute unit counts, only index figures; FPV mass production was identified as the primary driver of the acceleration.

Founded as a Soviet-era body and restructured in its current form in 2004, Rosstat sits within the Russian government executive apparatus. It publishes data in line with international statistical standards and contributes to UN and IMF reporting frameworks. Since 2022, however, Moscow has progressively restricted publication of sensitive economic indicators, including trade data, capital flows, and selected sectoral breakdowns. Intelligence agencies including Germany's BND and Sweden's MUST have assessed that official figures systematically understate inflation and budget deficits. Rosstat's industrial output indices remain published, but without absolute unit counts in the defence sector, external verification is structurally limited.

For Western analysts, Rosstat data on defence-adjacent sectors functions as a directional indicator rather than a precise figure. The direction of the April 2026 aviation output series is broadly consistent with open-source assessments of accelerating Russian drone production, even if the scale cannot be independently confirmed.