Russia's spending on the war in Ukraine has reached $240 million a day - analysts

Russian budget expenditures to finance the war with Ukraine have exceeded $3 trillion as of early May, according to Janis Kluge, a researcher at the German Institute for International Security Studies, citing data from the Electronic Budget system.

Source. This was reported by The Moscow Times.

According to the Ministry of Finance, the budget spent 789.8 billion rubles on open items in the "national defense of the Russian Federation" section alone as of May 15. This amount should be added to secret spending of 3 trillion rubles, of which 80% (2.4 trillion rubles) goes to the military, Kluge notes.

Thus, on average, each month of fighting costs the budget about 720 billion rubles – $5.7 billion.

This is two annual budgets of rich regions, such as the Yamalo-Nenets or Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrugs, or 8 annual budgets of poor entities, such as Bryansk or Vladimir regions.

Every day, the military machine eats up about 30 billion rubles, an amount comparable to what the poorest regions collect in their budgets in a year. For example, the revenues of the Jewish Autonomous Region in 2023 are set at 19.3 billion rubles, Kalmykia – 24.9 billion rubles, Ingushetia – 35.9 billion rubles.

According to the Russian Ministry of Finance, in January-April, budget revenues from oil and gas taxes halved, total revenues fell by 22%, and the deficit reached 3.4 trillion rubles, exceeding the plan for the whole year.

In April alone, the budget gap exceeded a trillion rubles, and the decline in oil and gas revenues accelerated to 64% after 43-46% in January-March.