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Denmark and Finland became Thursday the last countries to suspend new weapons agreements with Saudi Arabia. The Danish Foreign Ministry has announced the freezing of new agreements on Khashoggi and Yemen, while the Finnish Foreign Ministry has only mentioned Yemen. Finland has also banned new arms sales to the United Arab Emirates, which are part of the Saudi-led coalition in the conflict.
Their announcements took place just two days after Germany announced its intention to stop all transfers of arms to the kingdom.
Denmark and Finland are not the main arms suppliers in Saudi Arabia, but Germany certainly is. He had already suspended new arms deals with Saudi Arabia, but on Monday he expanded this ban to also include weapons transfers to existing orders.
So where does Saudi Arabia shoot its weapons?
But many exporters still selling to the Saudis have significantly reduced their supply in recent years. The United Kingdom, for example, has transferred weapons worth an estimated $ 843 million in 2016, but almost halved that value to $ 436 million last year, according to SIPRI. (The database uses constant values relative to 1990 prices to eliminate currency fluctuations and inflation.)
French exports of major weapons to Saudi Arabia amounted to $ 174 million in 2015, but fell to $ 91 million in 2016 and $ 27 million last year.
The United States dwarfs other exporters
Despite these decreases, the overall value of Saudi arms imports has actually increased by 38% between 2016 and 2017.
This is almost entirely because of a huge increase in transfers from the United States, which has nearly doubled its value exports from $ 1.8 billion to $ 3.4 billion over this period. Germany has also increased its exports from $ 14 million to $ 105 million, even though it should be much lower this year after its suspension.
Overall, no country is moving closer to the United States in terms of weapons supply. In the last five years, for example, the United States accounted for 61% of the major arms sales to the Saudis. The United Kingdom was far behind with a market share of 23%, while France, in third place, accounted for only 4%.
China supplies a negligible amount of major weapons to Saudi Arabia, according to SIPRI data, but it is increasing. Russia provides so little that it does not appear in the database of the organization.
"In the last 10 to 15 years, Russia has been trying to penetrate the big Saudi arms market, without success." Saudi Arabia has bought Russian rifles and may have bought from Russia. other items, but these transactions have been very modest, "said Pieter Wezeman, senior researcher at SIPRI's arms transfer and military spending program.
"China has penetrated more substantially into the Saudi arms market, including selling armed drones," said Wezeman.
"The details are obscure and we may have underestimated the role of China as an arms exporter in Saudi Arabia, but China is not getting closer to the United States, the United Kingdom. United Kingdom or even France as arms suppliers. "Arabia has explored the possibility of diversifying its supplier base."
