KRET
KRET — Kontsern Radioelektronnye Tekhnologii, or Radio-Electronic Technologies Concern — is the electronic warfare and avionics arm of Rostec, the Russian state defence holding. It was formed in 2009 by consolidating dozens of Soviet-era radio-electronics plants and design bureaus into a single structure. The concern is headquartered in central Moscow on Goncharnaya Street and run by general director Nikolay Kolesov, a long-serving defence-industry executive who has led the group since its creation. Across its subsidiaries from Kazan to Tambov to Yekaterinburg, KRET has reported a workforce in the tens of thousands, making it one of the larger industrial employers in the Rostec portfolio.
The product line spans two tracks that rarely sit together elsewhere: military electronic warfare and civil avionics. On the defence side, KRET subsidiaries produce the Krasukha family of ground-based jammers, the Khibiny self-protection suite fitted to Su-34 and Su-35 fighters, the Vitebsk and President-S electronic countermeasure systems used on helicopters and transports, and the Richag-AV broadband jamming system mounted on Mi-8 variants. The concern also makes identification-friend-or-foe transponders, radar warning receivers, and the onboard electronics suites for a wide range of Russian combat aircraft. On the civil side, its plants supply navigation and flight-control equipment for Russia’s domestic airliner programmes.
Deployment is extensive but difficult to verify independently. The company and the Russian defence ministry have promoted the Krasukha-4 as capable of blinding airborne radars at several hundred kilometres, and both have pointed to its presence in Syria and Ukraine as evidence of effectiveness. Open-source analysts have confirmed KRET systems in both theatres through wreckage and captured equipment, but battlefield performance claims — kill counts, GPS-denial zones, suppression of Western precision strikes — are disputed between Russian and Ukrainian sources. Western assessments have at various points rated Russian electronic warfare in Donbas as formidable or significantly degraded; the ground truth sits somewhere between the two.
On the civil track, the trade outlet RuAviation reported in June 2026 that KRET had approved a 2.5 billion rouble programme to expand its Elektropribor facility in Tambov, adding a building of more than 12,000 square metres for strapdown inertial navigation systems based on laser gyroscopes. The equipment is intended for the MC-21, Superjet 100, Il-114-300, Tu-214 and Il-96 airliner families — the heart of Russia’s post-sanctions attempt to run a domestic civil aviation industry without Western avionics. Elektropribor employs around 4,500 people in Tambov, and the expanded line is expected to add roughly 500 jobs.
KRET has been under Western sanctions since the mid-2010s, with the restrictions sharply tightened after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The measures target financing, dual-use electronics imports and specific subsidiaries, and have fed the concern’s push to source components domestically or through permissive third countries. Plans for a KRET initial public offering, floated several times in the 2010s, have not materialised.
Within Russia’s defence-industrial complex KRET sits alongside Almaz-Antey and Ruselectronics as one of the pillars Rostec relies on for electronics. Its combination of airborne and ground electronic warfare with a civil avionics portfolio makes it one of the most structurally important subsidiaries in the holding.