Visualizing Russian federal budget spending

If you're interested in analyzing Russian federal budget spending, here's an interactive treemap you can use.

Russian budget data is difficult to interpret if you don’t want to do it as a full-time job. I set up a visualization tool (initially for myself) to analyze spending patterns. As of now, it is quite simple, but if you want to better understand how Russia’s federal budget works, it may be helpful to you as well. The current version of the tool is based on spending in the first quarter of 2025 (not the full year).

Source: Screenshot from budget.jakluge.de, data from Russia’s Finance Ministry

The areas of the squares correspond to the ruble amount spent on the different budget categories and sub-categories. By clicking on areas, you can drill down to see more detailed data points. By clicking on “Federal budget” in the top-left corner, you can return to the initial view.

Every ruble that Russia spends is connected to

• a certain category (Social policy, National economy, National defense etc.)

• a certain spending project (like the “State program for ensuring Russia’s defense capability”)

• to a certain agency or ministry (MoD, Finance Ministry etc.).

This is why there are three different ways to structure the visualization. I created a treemap for all three. For spending by project and spending by agency, the treemap shows the categories with the project/agency as well. The translation from Russian was done automatically. I may add a Russian version later on, which may be more helpful for the Russian speakers.

Here are the links - enjoy:

Russian federal budget spending in Q1/2025 by category

Russian federal budget spending in Q1/2025 by program

Russian federal budget spending in Q1/2025 by agency/ministry

PS: I used the treemap functionality of plotly to set it up. The colors don’t correspond to the meaning of spending items in anyway. The tool still has major weaknesses (it is a static site - all data is loaded up front, it is hard to use on the phone, and text wrapping is very crude). If you have suggestions or ideas for improvement, or maybe an idea for a better tool that I could use, please let me know in the comments!