"The results are not bad: 4.4 billion dollars for this year. It is much better than last year," Putin told a meeting of Russia's powerful Security Council in televised remarks.

Russia, which has not sold such a quantity of weapons abroad since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, is therefore set to be one of the major arms exporters in the world this past year after the United States.

The Russians sold 3.68 billion dollars of military hardware abroad in 2000, according to Kremlin figures.

"We occupy one of the top places in the world arms market," the Russian president said, but cautioned against drawing "over-optimistic conclusions."

"Today we have only begun to recover lost opportunities," Putin said, warning that unless there was a "major improvement in the efficiency" of Russia's weapons exports there would be "no major breakthrough."

He said it would be tough to increase the Russian share of the highly competitive market, one problem being that although some 60 countries buy military hardware from Russia, only two to three are major customers.

According to a US Congress report published in August, a close review of Russia's largest value arms agreements in recent years showed they have been with two main clients, China and India, which together account for some 80 percent of all arms exports by Russia.

"While some former arms clients in the developing world continue to express interest in obtaining additional Russian weaponry, they have been restricted in doing so by a lack of funds," the report said.

Since Putin took office in December 1999, the government has made the recovery of lost Soviet-era arms markets a priority.

In November last year he created a mammoth new Russian arms-exporting agency, Rosoboronexport, by merging the country's two largest arms exporters.

The Russian government also defied US pressure this year and struck a new military cooperation deal with Tehran that could be worth around seven billion dollars in Russian arms exports according to military analysts.

The United States, which regards Iran as a "rogue state," has sharply criticized Russia for selling military and nuclear technology to Tehran.

The United States is the biggest arms seller in the world, exporting 18.6 billion dollars of arms in 2000, with Britain, France and Russia lagging behind.

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