Russian federal buget: Military spending and recruits in Q3
Russia's spending data for Q3/2025 shows no slowdown in military spending. Also, the recruitment puzzle from Q2 has been solved.
Russia published its latest federal budget report today. You can analyze the latest data with the Russian budget browser (click here). A few quick conclusions:
Russian military spending is not slowing down
Military spending has continued at its previous (record) pace. In Q3, it increased by over 3.6 trillion rubles relative to Q2. In 2024, military spending in Q3 was only 2.6 trillion, which means that - in nominal terms - spending was 38% higher this year than last year. If you consider that not all of Russian military spending is directly war-related, the “Ukraine war share” rose by even more than 38%, which demonstrates the ever increasing cost of the invasion for Russia.
Relative to GDP, total military spending this year remains above 8% of GDP after Q3 (close to 8.3% of GDP). For the year so far, the total is 11.9 trillion rubles. It is already clear that military spending will exceed the budgeted total for 2025 (15.2 trillion) by a quite significant amount. (I’m always getting complaints for posting time series charts in nominal rubles, so I will start with military spending relative to year-to-date GDP).
For those who would like to look at the development in nominal rubles (inflation and economic growth not considered):
Federal budget data on recruitment is back!
Fortunately, the latest batch of data includes recruitment spending, and the calculations are making sense again. After a suspiciously low sum in Q2 (38,000 recruits), the total for Q3 was much higher (135,000). Apparently, some spending on sign-on bonuses that belonged to Q2 was moved to Q3. If you recalculate the number of recruits based on the new data, this is what you get (contextualized with regional and Medvedev data):
If we use the average of Q2 and Q3 for both months, the result looks pretty much in line with regional and Medvedev data:
