Russia plans sharp defence spending hike in 2025

Russia plans sharp defence spending hike in 2025
by AFP Staff Writers
Moscow (AFP) Sept 30, 2024

Russia plans to boost its defence budget by almost 30 percent next year as it diverts resources to its Ukraine offensive, spending more on the military than welfare and education combined, a draft budget showed on Monday.

Moscow had already ramped up military spending to levels not seen since the Soviet Union era, pumping out missiles and drones to fire on Ukraine and paying lucrative salaries to its hundreds of thousands of soldiers fighting on the front lines.

The latest planned increase in spending will take Russia's defence budget to 13.5 trillion rubles ($145 billion) in 2025, a document published on the parliamentary website showed, up from 10.4 trillion in 2024.

That figure does not include some other resources being directed to the military campaign, such as spending that Russia labels as "domestic security" and some outlays classified as top secret.

Combined spending on defence and security will account for around 40 percent of Russia's total government spending, seen at 41.5 trillion rubles in 2025.

Before sending the draft budget to the Russian parliament, Moscow trumpeted an increase in investment and social welfare alongside higher military outlays.

The "top priority" of the budget was to be "social support for citizens", Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told a televised government meeting on September 24.

"The second is the provision of expenditures on defence and security, providing the resources for the special military operation and support for families of those participating in the special military operation," he added, using Russia's official language for its Ukraine offensive.

But the draft budget suggest that military spending has crowded out spending on other areas of the economy.

Planned spending on "national defence" is more than twice that allocated to areas Moscow labels as "social policy".

Ukraine has also been forced to accelerate its own military spending as it battles the Russian offensive.

Kyiv will allocate more than 60 percent of the country's entire budget to defence and security next year.

But Russia's $145-billion defence budget dwarfs Ukraine's at $54 billion, with Kyiv reliant on Western military and financial aid to continue fighting.

- 'Truth is on our side' -

The budget announcement came as Russian President Vladimir Putin marked what he calls "Reunification Day" -- the moment when Moscow annexed four southern and eastern Ukrainian regions in 2022.

"The truth is on our side. All goals set will be achieved," Putin said in a combative address on the second anniversary.

Russia claimed to annex the Ukrainian regions of Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in September 2022 but it does not fully control any of them.

On Monday evening, three journalists for independent Russian media were arrested outside a concert on Red Square in Moscow to mark the occasion, rights group OVD-info said -- the latest move in a crackdown on critical voices since the beginning of the offensive in Ukraine.

In recent months the Kremlin has pursued a relentless assault on its neighbour's east, pressing its advantage as Kyiv's soldiers grapple with exhaustion and continuous bombardment.

On Monday, the Russian army said its troops had "liberated" the Ukrainian village of Nelipivka, which had a population of around 1,000 before the conflict began in February 2022.

The village is one of several dozen that Russia claims to have captured in recent months, pressing forward even as Kyiv mounts a cross-border counteroffensive into Russian territory.

Nelipivka lies just north of the Ukrainian town of New York, where Kyiv claimed to have made rare gains earlier in September.

Ukrainian shelling in areas under Russian control killed a teenager and wounded eight other people including three children, said the Moscow-installed Donetsk regional governor Denis Pushilin.