For The First Time, The Kremlin Began Spending Half Of The Taxes Collected In The Budget On War

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For the first time since the invasion of Ukraine began, funding for the army and weapons purchases "ate" every second ruble collected from taxpayers to the federal budget, reports The Moscow Times.

The share of spending on war in the treasury's revenues in the first quarter of 2025 amounted to 50.1 percent, and at the end of the second - 48.2 percent, researcher Janis Kluge, a researcher at the German Institute for International Security Problems Janis Kluge, calculated on the basis of data from the Electronic Budget system.

For comparison: in 2022, the war machine burned 24.4 percent of taxes received by the budget; in 2023 - 32.05 percent, in 2024 - 39.05 percent. The previous record was recorded in the first quarter of 2023 - 45.4%.

The share of military items in budget expenditures is lower because the expenditures themselves exceed revenues and the budget is in deficit. Thus, in January-June, the Ministry of Finance collected Br17.584 trillion, and spent Br21.278 trillion.

Of this amount, 39.9% was spent on war, and in the first quarter - 41.2%. These values are absolute records in modern Russian history and exceed even the levels of the last years of the Soviet Union, when the collapse of the socialist economy forced the CPSU to put the giant military-industrial complex under the knife.

The 1990 budget allocated 71 billion rubles out of 241.3 billion, or 29.4%, for "military purposes" (data published in the archives of former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar).

In January-June, according to Kluge's calculations, the Kremlin spent 8.484 trillion rubles on defense items. Compared to the same period last year, spending on the army and weapons production increased by 31%; compared to January-June 2023 - by 95%, and if compared to the first year of the war - threefold.

The law on the budget of 2025 initially included 13.5 trillion rubles under the article "national defense" and another 3.459 trillion rubles under the article "national security," which includes the budgets of the police, Rosgvardia, Investigative Committee and special services. It was planned to spend about 8% of GDP, but in fact it will be even more, a government source told Reuters in August.

The Kremlin has no plans to cut the military budget in 2026 even if the active phase of hostilities in Ukraine is over, the source said: "We will still need to make shells and drones, although on a slightly smaller scale. The confrontation will remain, the army and spending on weapons will be bigger, because the West is increasing them as well."

The source said that if the war ends, the defense budget may decrease from 2027, but we should not expect it to drop to the levels that were "before the military war".

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