Original article (in Slovenian) was published on 27/3/2024; Author: Eva Gračanin
European Defence Agency data show that EU member states spent €326 billion on defence last year. Russia’s draft federal defence budget for the same year was just over €118 billion.
Miha Kordiš, an MP who used to be a member of the Left, claimed on a TV Slovenia’s current affairs show on 6 March that “the Russian Federation has a military budget three times smaller than the European Union already has”.
Kordiš made the statement in the context of a debate on a possible increase in Slovenia’s defence spending to 2% of gross domestic product (GDP). Before that, he said that he had been asking the Defence Ministry for ten years who is changing international security circumstances, but “has never received a concrete answer”. In his view, responses from the ministry imply that the Russian Federation is a threat to international security.
European Defence Agency data show that EU member states spent €326 billion on defence last year. Of the 27 member states, 23 are also members of NATO and they spent 1.99% of their combined GDP on defence, a share which is expected to rise to 2.04% next year.
In the draft federal budget of the Russian Federation for 2024-2026, which was adopted by the government there on 29 September 2023, Russia planned to spend about 10.775 billion roubles on national defence last year.
According to the InforEuro currency converter, which is based on the European Commission’s official monthly accounting rates for the euro, this was the equivalent of €104.13 billion in September 2023, and just over €118 billion at today’s exchange rate.
The latest data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) show that Russia allocated around €115.1 billion for military spending in 2023. The figure is based on the constant exchange rate of the US dollar, which is calculated using each country’s consumer price index. As explained in the Institute’s methodology, this is the conversion most suitable for comparisons over different time periods.
Data from a paper published last August in the bimonthly Intereconomics, which the author, German economist Florian Dorn, sourced from the SIPRI and his own calculations, show that Russia had kept its defence budget spending at an average of 3.5% of GDP since the end of the Cold War, but since its annexation of the Crimea peninsula in 2014, the share has risen to over 4%, putting it ahead of the US in relative terms.
The latest available data from SIPRI show that Russia spent 16.1% of the general government budget on defence in 2022. According to Dorn, this growth is due to the financing of the war in Ukraine. Dorn further explained that after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has shifted a significant part of its economy to the war industry. As a result, defence spending accounted for around 6% of GDP in 2023 and 2024.
Dorn cites warnings by some experts that if Russia continues its military efforts, it could threaten the European Union and Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty within a few years.
Article 5 states that an armed attack against one or more NATO members is an attack against all members. NATO members undertake to provide immediate assistance to the attacked county, in accordance with the right of individual or collective self-defence, either alone or in cooperation with other states, which includes the use of armed force.
The European Commission’s White Paper for European Defence Readiness 2030, published in March this year, foresees additional investment in armament, including through loans. These investments are a response to geopolitical threats, such as the war in Ukraine and migration, and to various security threats that are becoming increasingly interconnected and frequent, such as terrorism, violent extremism, and the activities of transnational criminal gangs and cybercriminal networks.
If the defence spending figure is rounded down, Miha Kordiš’s assertion that ” the Russian Federation has a military budget three times smaller than the European Union already has” is true.
