Update on Russian military spending
Russia's defense spending is up 40% this year compared to 2023, but not far from the original budget plans for 2024.
Russia’s defense spending is up sharply from last year, but will probably only slightly exceed the planned amount of 10.7 trillion rubles in 2024. A new batch of Russian budget data indicates a slow third quarter that, however, is still 53% above last year’s third quarter. Most of Russian defense spending is not disclosed, but it is not difficult to estimate the amount: Total secret spending is known, and defense spending has usually been around 80% of that since the start of the full-scale invasion.1
Since my last update, budget spending for the second quarter was revised downwards slightly, leading to a new estimate of 2.4 trillion rubles defense spending in April-June (instead of 2.7 trillion) . Estimated defense spending from January-September is 7.1 trillion rubles (up 40% from last year).
As usual, the final three months of the year will far exceed the previous quarters. Based on seasonal patterns from the last years, I expect defense spending to be 4.3 trillion rubles in the last quarter, leading to a total of 11.5 trillion rubles in 2024 (instead of the planned 10.7 trillion). In the latest budget documents, the GDP in 2024 is estimated at 195.8 trillion rubles. This would mean 5.9% of GDP for defense spending and 7-8% for military spending (see the last update for some disambiguation of military/defense/war spending).
While the disclosed spending makes it very difficult to read changes within the defense budget, some parts of open defense spending are interesting as well. One example is Russian spending on military cooperation with foreign states.2 This could be related to Russian military cooperation with North Korea or Iran. It may seem strange that this type of spending would not be classified. At the same time, there is no plausible explanation for what other military cooperation with foreign states Russia would spend several billion dollars a year on.
Russia also publishes data on salaries in the national defense program.3 This data is certainly not a complete representation of personnel costs, but it may still give an indication of changes in the military’s payroll. It is up 26% from last year, which could be both due to higher salaries and due to recruitment. It includes civilian personnel of the defense ministry as well, so it probably understates the increase in spending on soldiers.
There are more sophisticated ways of estimating the amount. For example, Julian Cooper assumes that the share of secret spending will remain constant in all budget chapters and calculates the defense share in secret spending as a residual. One could also assume that the nominal amounts of secret spending in all budget chapters except defense remains the same. Depending on the methodology, the result can differ, but only by a few percentage points.
Комплекс процессных мероприятий "Обеспечение военного сотрудничества с иностранными государствами"
This subprogram also includes spending that is classified as social spending, e.g. expenditure on soldiers’ benefits. Комплекс процессных мероприятий "Обеспечение денежным довольствием военнослужащих, заработной платой гражданского персонала, а также выплата пособий и компенсаций"