Russia’s military spending hits a record 44% of its budget

Russia spent a record 44% of its federal budget on the military in the first half of 2026, according to calculations published by Janis Kluge, a research fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, based on data from Russia’s Finance Ministry.

Direct military spending totaled 10.7 trillion rubles, about $125 billion at current exchange rates, for the first six months of the year, Kluge found, a 30% increase over the same period in 2025. That spending equaled 10.5% of Russia’s gross domestic product for the first half of the year and 57.3% of federal budget revenue, meaning more than half of every ruble the government collected in taxes and other income went toward the war.

Kluge’s data shows classified spending, budget lines the Kremlin does not disclose in detail, driving much of the increase. Russia’s 2026 budget law set a full-year target of 11.6 trillion rubles for classified spending, but the government had already spent more than 8.4 trillion rubles on those hidden categories after just six months, putting the full year on pace to blow well past its own budgeted figure. Russian budget documents indicate that roughly 85% of classified spending goes to military needs, based on figures Kluge has cited from earlier quarters this year.

The military’s share of the federal budget has climbed steadily since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. Kluge’s tracker, which compares the first half of each year going back to 2018, shows military spending at 24.5% of federal budget outlays in the first half of that pre-war year, dropping to around 20% in 2020 and 2021, then rising sharply to 29.6% in the first half of 2023, 36.6% in 2024, and 39.3% in 2025 before reaching the current 43.8% figure for 2026. Open, publicly itemized military spending has held relatively steady over that same stretch, hovering between roughly 11% and 15% of the budget each year.

Nearly all of the growth has come from the classified category, which has gone from a modest supplement to open spending before the war to now making up close to two-thirds of the total military budget.

Total direct budgetary military spending since the start of the full-scale invasion now stands at 57.1 trillion rubles, or roughly $666 billion, according to Kluge’s calculations. That figure covers only formal federal budget line items and does not include off-budget costs such as regional government spending on recruitment bonuses and compensation payments to the families of killed and wounded soldiers, costs Kluge has tracked separately in other analyses of Russia’s regional budgets.

The first quarter of 2026 alone saw military spending reach 5.9 trillion rubles, itself a record at the time and up 30% from the first quarter of 2025, driven largely by a 43% jump in classified spending during that period compared with a year earlier. Kluge has since raised a technical question about the scale of that first-quarter jump, noting that Russian federal spending patterns showed unusually low classified outlays at the end of 2025 and that December 2025 budget spending overall fell sharply from a year earlier.

That pattern, he has suggested, could mean the Finance Ministry deferred some spending originally planned for 2025 into 2026, in part to avoid missing the deficit target the government had publicly committed to for last year.

The spending surge has come as Russia’s oil and gas revenue, historically the backbone of its federal budget, has weakened. Kluge’s first-quarter data showed oil and gas revenue falling 45% year over year, a decline tied to Western sanctions on Russian energy exports and a stronger ruble that reduces the ruble value of oil sold in dollars.

Non-oil and gas revenue rose about 7% over the same period, but not enough to offset the shortfall, leaving military spending equivalent to roughly two-thirds of total federal budget revenue in the first quarter, by Kluge’s calculation. Bloomberg has separately reported that Russian finance officials have privately told President Vladimir Putin that current war spending levels are becoming unaffordable.

Kluge’s calculations rely on published Russian Finance Ministry budget execution data, which the ministry continues to release on a regular schedule even as it withholds detail on how classified funds are ultimately spent. He has cautioned that spending patterns typically ease in the second and third quarters of the year compared with the first, meaning the full-year share of GDP devoted to the military could land lower than a straight-line projection from Q1 alone would suggest, even as the absolute ruble totals keep setting records.