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.

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.

Credit: aljazeera.com

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