Putin Ordered The Preparation Of A Budget To Continue The War
- 27.07.2026, 20:06
Russian citizens will pay for the war.
Military spending will remain a priority in the preparation of the budget for the next three years, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday.
At a meeting with deputies of the 8th State Duma, which concluded its session on July 27, Putin accused the West of launching a “Russophobic machine” and setting “world records” for sanctions, and said that “no one will ever” succeed in “breaking the Russian people.”
“Our political system and government institutions are formed on sovereign principles in full accordance with the Constitution of the Russian Federation and are ready to defend the country; together with society, they are capable of decisively repelling any hostile actions,” Putin said. In addition to “strengthening the country’s defense,” he said, “addressing priority social issues” should be a priority for the 2027–29 budget.
In the 2026 budget law, the government initially allocated 12.9 trillion rubles under the “national defense” line item. However, in reality, the military budget will exceed the plan by 4–5 trillion rubles, sources familiar with the situation told Bloomberg in June. According to them, to cover all war-related expenses, the Ministry of Finance is preparing spending cuts in civilian budget lines and intends to take on 2–3 trillion rubles in additional debt.
Actual budget expenditures for the war with Ukraine had already reached 5.9 trillion rubles by the end of the first quarter, according to calculations by Janis Klugé , a research fellow at the German Institute for International Security Affairs , based on data from the Ministry of Finance. Compared to the same period last year, spending on the military and weapons production increased by 29.9%; compared to January–March 2024, by 68.7%; compared to 2023, by 129%; and 4.6 times higher than in the first quarter of 2022.
According to his calculations, the cumulative cost of the war with Ukraine since 2022 has amounted to 53.079 trillion rubles, or $746.6 billion, for Russian taxpayers. This amount covers 28 years of current budget expenditures on healthcare, 30 years of expenditures on education, and 100 annual budgets of large regions, such as the Krasnoyarsk Krai or the Sverdlovsk Oblast.
The priority given to defense and security in the budget is forcing the authorities to “take a more selective approach” to funding other areas, notes Emil Ablaev, a leading expert at the Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Policy (CMACP). At the same time, he notes, the resources available to fill the budget gap through permanent increases in the tax burden are dwindling.
Last year, despite increases in the corporate income tax and the scrap metal tax, budget revenues fell 3 trillion rubles short of the target, and this year the problems have “worsened,” Ablaev points out: The Ministry of Finance raised the VAT to 22%, but the deficit had already reached nearly 6 trillion rubles by the end of the first half of the year. By the end of the year, the “hole” in the treasury could grow to 7 trillion, the expert predicts.