Russian lawmakers give final nod on record military funding boost 

Lawmakers in Russia’s upper house have given final parliamentary approval to a plan to boost military spending by almost 30 percent next year.

The Federation Council on Wednesday passed the 2025 budget, which builds spending on defence and security to levels not seen since the Soviet era. The boost, which follows a similar move for 2024, comes as Moscow pursues its war in Ukraine and steps up its rhetoric against Western and their supply of weapons to Kyiv.

The budget earmarks a record 13.5 trillion rubles (about $125bn) in spending on “national defence”. That is about 3 trillion rubles (about $26.6bn) more than was apportioned for this year, which itself represented a post-Cold War record for being Russia’s largest military spending.

The outlay on defence in 2025 is planned to exceed the spending planned for welfare and education combined.

In addition, the headline spending figure does not include resources for “domestic security” and some other categories classified as top secret.

The budget will now be sent to be signed into law by President Vladimir Putin.

‘All decency’

As intense fighting continues in Ukraine’s eastern regions, where Russia has been slowly making advances, as well as Kursk inside Russia, Moscow is signalling it plans to sustain the war effort, and has hit out at the West for increasing its support for Kyiv.

Putin has maintained that Ukraine must surrender, give up some of its seized territory, and pledge not to join NATO.

Moscow confirmed last week that Russia tested a hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile in an assault on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

The move, Russia said, was in response to Ukraine’s use of missiles supplied by the United States and United Kingdom inside Russian territory.

Putin also recently signed off on a revision of Russia’s nuclear doctrine, which would now authorise a nuclear strike if attacked by a non-nuclear state that is backed by a nuclear power.

On Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said NATO has “thrown away all decency” and is now pushing for direct preemptive strikes on Russian missile launch sites deep inside its territory.

Strained economies

Amid the increasing Western funding and arming of Ukraine, Kyiv also passed record defence spending plans earlier this month.

Ukrainian lawmakers in parliament backed a budget that earmarked 2.2 trillion hryvnias (more than $53bn), about 26 percent of Ukraine’s gross domestic product (GDP), for defence and security in 2025.

The surge in Moscow’s military spending has come as its economy continues to deal with the fallout of the war, including rising inflation and a weakening national currency.

The ruble, which traded at about 75-80 to the US dollar, has faced renewed pressure amid the escalating war and now changes hands at more than 105 per dollar.

The Russian budget greenlit on Wednesday predicted a 4.5 percent inflation rate for 2025, coming down to 4 percent in the next two years.

It projected GDP to increase by 2.5 percent in 2025; Russian GDP has slowly risen during the past two years to reach 2.8 percent growth.