Russia spends a higher percentage of its GDP on defense than key NATO players, data shows, as the alliance doubles down on efforts to funnel more funds into military spending.
Russia spent 4.1 percent of its GDP on its military in 2022—a figure more than double the NATO target for defense spending among its members, according to figures published by Statista. Countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel, among others, spent between 4.5 percent and 7.4 percent of their GDP on defense, while Ukraine's defense spending amounted to 34 percent of its GDP last year in the aftermath of Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion, which was launched in February 2022.
U.S. defense spending comprised around 3.5 percent of the country's GDP last year, according to Statista, although the U.S. remains the runaway leader in gross terms.
Washington spent $877 billion on defense in 2022, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) think tank reported in May 2023. That accounted for 39 percent of global military spending in 2022, or more than the next 10 big spenders combined.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has repeatedly pressed all the alliance's members to quickly boost defense spending, particularly since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began.
"There's no doubt that we need to do more and we need to do it faster," he told reporters at NATO headquarters in Brussels in March.
This commitment once again resurfaced during NATO's Vilnius summit, during which British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the alliance's "readiness" was now bolstered by all allies being "committed to hitting the 2 percent target."
Back in 2006, NATO defense ministers agreed to commit a minimum of 2 percent of each country's GDP to defense spending but it has been considered more an aim than a concrete threshold. In 2014, as Russia annexed Crimea, NATO moved to make this commitment a reality within the next two years.
Stoltenberg said earlier this month that the countries of the alliance would "set a more ambitious defense investment pledge, to invest a minimum of 2 percent of GDP annually on defense," without specifying a timeline.
NATO considers the 2 percent to be "an important indicator of the political resolve of individual Allies to devote to defense a relatively small but still significant level of resources."
However, only seven of the nations in NATO met or exceeded this benchmark in 2022.
"Two percent should not be seen as a ceiling to hit, but really a floor that should be built upon," U.S. national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told The New York Times ahead of this month's NATO summit.
In late June, a SIPRI report suggested Russia's military spending budget for 2023 is approximately $85.8 billion, or around 4.4 percent of its GDP. Russia became the third-largest defense spender in the world in 2022, after the U.S. and China, according to SIPRI.
Before the Kremlin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it is thought Russia's military budget hovered at around 3.6 percent of its GDP. It is hard to get a precise picture of Moscow's military spending, as the Russian government has stopped publishing regular budgets and exact numbers are often shrouded in secrecy.
But Reuters data from earlier this year shows that Russian defense spending increased by 282 percent in January and February 2023, compared with figures from 2022—more than a third of the total federal budget expenditure.
Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry and to NATO for comment via email.
Uncommon Knowledge
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About the writer
Ellie Cook is a Newsweek security and defense reporter based in London, U.K. Her work focuses largely on the Russia-Ukraine ... Read more
