Russia's Only Fiber Optic Plant Shut Down For Nearly A Year After Ukrainian Drone Strike
- 26.02.2026, 11:16
Now everything is 100% dependent on fiber supplies from China.
The country's only plant producing optical fiber, which is used in the telecommunications industry and by the Russian military in the war against Ukraine, has stopped working in Russia since May 2025.
In April-May last year, JSC Optical Fiber Systems in Saransk went out of business as a result of a series of Ukrainian attacks and has not yet restored operations, ComNews Group CEO Leonid Konik told Vedomosti. The company's production capacity was about 4 million kilometers of fiber per year, from which two dozen Russian cable factories made fiber optic cables. Now they are 100% dependent on fiber supplies from China.
At the same time, Chinese suppliers have raised fiber prices for Russian buyers by 2.5-4 times since 2026, noted Eurocable-1, Incab and the country's largest backbone operator Transtelecom. According to Konik, at the beginning of 2025, G.652D fiber, which is used in fiber-optic cables, cost 16 yuan per 1 km in China, by the end of the year - 25 yuan, and in January this year - already 40 yuan. Such a strong price growth is explained by the sharply increased demand. In particular, Russia and Ukraine have started using fiber optic cables for drones, which can be launched up to 50 km away. This makes drones invulnerable to radio electronic suppression equipment.
As a result, Russia will consume 10.5% of the world's fiber optic output in 2025, although the figure did not exceed 1% before, says Chun Sheng, an analyst at the Fiber Optic Cable Research Center of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT). Thus, in absolute terms, Russia purchased nearly 60 million km of fiber last year. At the same time, the growth of its cost for Russian consumers is quite natural, as the world as a whole is experiencing a shortage of fiber due to the development of artificial intelligence and the construction of infrastructure for it, said the author of the telegram channel abloud62 Alexei Boyko.
The main risk today is not so much in the price, but in the physical availability of fiber volumes, said the general director of Inkab Alexander Smilgevich. According to him, suppliers have already switched to 100% prepayment due to the increase in the purchase cost of raw materials. As a result, cable plants will not be able to keep prices for finished products and will be forced to raise them, Boyko added. According to Anastasia Bijelova of Telecom Exchange, this will inevitably cause the price of both dark fiber rental services and construction of backbone communication networks to rise in Russia.