The Russian government wants to earmark 32.5% of its spending next year for defense, a record amount and up from a reported 28.3% this year, as Moscow seeks to prevail in the war in Ukraine.
The government’s draft budget released Monday proposes spending just under 13.5 trillion rubles (over $145 billion) on national defense. That is about 3 trillion rubles ($32 billion) more than was set aside for defense this year and was the previous record.
The Ukraine war is Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II and has drained the resources of both sides, with Ukraine getting billions of dollars in help from its Western allies.
Russia’s forces are bigger and better-equipped than Ukraine’s, and in recent months the Russian army has gradually been pushing Ukrainian troops backward in eastern areas.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the United States last week in pursuit of continuing financial and military support as the war approaches its three-year milestone next February.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is also looking how to sustain his war effort as military spending has placed a huge strain on the Russian economy.
Earlier this month, Russia’s central bank raised its key interest rate by a full percentage point to 19% to combat high inflation. It held out the prospect of more rate increases to return inflation from the current 9.1% to the bank’s target of 4% in 2025.
According to the draft budget, spending on defense should decline in 2026.
The proposed budget could still change as it goes through three readings in the State Duma, Russia’s lower parliament house, and then goes to the Federation Council, the upper house, before Russian President Vladimir Putin signs it into law.
Meanwhile, Putin on Monday signed a call-up order for 133,000 conscripts in the autumn military draft, which is a routine number for seasonal conscription campaigns.
In September, he ordered the country’s military to increase Russia's number of troops by 180,000 to a total of 1.5 million. Overall military personnel would be about 2.4 million.
Overnight, Russia fired missiles and drones at 11 regions of Ukraine, the Ukrainian air force said Monday, in a 33rd consecutive night of aerial attacks behind the front line and set a new monthly record of drone barrages.
It was the first time Russians launched more than 1,000 Shahed drones in a month. It was also the first time the Iranian-made drones were used in every aerial attack on each day of the month.
In Kyiv, multiple explosions and machine gun fire could be heard throughout the night as the Ukrainian capital’s air defenses fought off a drone attack for five hours.
No casualties were reported in Kyiv or elsewhere, though a “critical infrastructure object” caught fire in the southern Mykolaiv region, Gov. Vitalii Kim said, without elaborating.
Russia has increasingly deployed Shahed drones, rather than more expensive missiles, in its aerial bombardment of Ukrainian cities since its full-scale invasion of its neighbor in February 2022.
It launched more than 1,300 Shahed drones at Ukraine in September alone — the highest number of drone attacks in a single month since the war began.
Ukraine, too, has developed a new generation of drones for the battlefield and for long-range strikes deep inside Russia. More than 100 Ukrainian drones were shot down over Russia on Sunday, Russian officials said.
Also Monday, Putin released a video marking the second anniversary of the annexation of four Ukrainian territories and again accused the West of turning Ukraine into “a military base aimed at Russia.”
Putin was speaking to mark the annexation of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine after a referendum held in 2022 which was denounced by the West as a sham. Russia also illegally annexed Crimea in 2014.
Since 2022, Putin said, businesses in the occupied areas are being “actively restored” and hospitals and schools are being rebuilt.
Thousands of Ukrainians fled from the four regions as a result of Russia’s invasion, but Putin said Russia’s military operation in the country was to defend residents’ “well-being” and the “future for our children and grandchildren.”
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13 Comments
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Underworld
Who still thinks that Putin wants peace?
Banthu
How did we go from Russia losing all it's tanks and having to pull WW2 tanks out of museums to suddenly the Russian army being better equipped than Zelensky's army which has been given 300 billion in NATO weapons?
Hint: The western media misled the public when it said 2 years ago that it was a "full-scale" invasion and that the Russians lost all their men and equipment.
The experts in the West surely knew that 90% of Russia's army was not even engaged at the beginning and was being held in reserve, but they omitted this very important fact to drum up support for the a war whose outcome was inevitable.
John
We don’t. It’s still junk with replacement junk flowing in from Iran and DORK.
Mini-me is going to bankrupt his country over a war he isn’t going to win.
Banthu
So either junk from Iran and DORK is better than $300 billion in NATO weapons
or
The article is false when is specifically said that the Russian army is "better equipped"
Some dude
"We are crushing the Ukrainian forces who so evilly attacked us two years ago, they started it, they did! It's their fault! But we're beating them back and just to prove it we're going to use an entire third of our budget to protect ourselves!"
ok1517
Well, well, well ....
Looking outside of Moscow people don't have water toilets.
People don't have baths or at least showers.
Roads are nothing else but "rollbahns".
A sewer system doesn't exist.
Most areas WIFI never heard of.
But Putain wants to spend more and more money for his aggressions and invasions.
What a great leader!!
bo
Putin has ruined his country ,for what reason I cannot begin to fathom .But the Russian people need to wake up fast and get rid of him somehow
JeffLee
The article doesn't mention Russia's pathetic tanks. The gist is that Russia needs to spend a third of its annual budget to fight an enemy that's one quarter the size of itself, while it's had to hike its interest rates to 19% to fight rampant inflation at home.
fallaffel
Probably by spending a third of the national budget on it, and neglecting the Russian people and their needs?
Primusinter
You forgot to add that bears with balalaika walk around the streets of Russian cities :), and children in schools are given vodka for lunch. But seriously, the one thing I miss when I come to Tokyo or Paris is cheap, affordable high-speed Russian Internet. But it is unlikely that you will be able to verify this. because you don't even know where the country of Russia is on the map. However, you don't know anything about Ukraine either
Mr Kipling
You mean the ones that don't sink in the mud like the Abrams and Leopards? Great in Iraq but not so good in the Autumn mud in the Dombas.
Sven Asai
It's not anymore a problem of guilt, who is bigger or who started. They are both just throwing their future and existence away. Killing own youth by sending to frontline will soon turn out suicidal for both. If they are taken over by former Caucasian Soviet Era republics, other central Asians, India, China, or more probably by North African Arabs or Africans, that is not exactly predictable, but it will happen by any of them or a combination. It's recommended they end their stupid brother war immediately and care a lot better about their young generations instead of slaughtering them at the front.
wallace
The Russians are paying for the war with many tens of thousands killed on the frontline.