OPINION: 40% of Russia's Budget to War — A People Sacrificed

When war takes almost half of everything

Some numbers resist abstraction. 40 percent. That is the share of the Russian federal budget allocated in 2026 to defense and security — or 16.84 trillion rubles, roughly $238 billion. Nearly one ruble in two. And even this official figure is itself an understatement: in operational reality, the military share reached 46 percent in the first quarter — and could climb to 48 percent according to some recent data. Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary General, cited that latter figure at the meeting of Defense Ministers on June 18, 2026.

Behind that percentage lie political choices that commit an entire generation of Russians. Every ruble sent to war is a ruble stolen from the hospital that was not built, the school that was not renovated, the road that was not repaired, the researcher who was not trained. This is not abstract accounting — it is the biography of a people rewritten in wartime, without anyone being asked.

An absolute record in Russia's modern history

To measure the scale of this forced sacrifice, one must compare. In 2021, before the full-scale invasion, defense represented roughly 17 percent of the Russian federal budget. In 2022, that figure rose to 19 percent. In 2023, to 29.5 percent. In 2025, to 41 percent. In 2026, officially 40 percent but realistically 46 to 48 percent. In fewer than five years, Russia has tripled the share of its budget devoted to defense. No country outside a situation of total war has ever undergone such a fiscal transformation in so short a time.

And the curve does not stop there. Bloomberg revealed on June 18, 2026 that the government plans to add 4 to 5 trillion additional rubles to military spending this year — which could push the share of defense and security to 50 percent of the total budget. Half. Of everything. Poured into the war machine. This is a statistic that should be on every front page worldwide. It is not. And that is a collective failure.

When I say "a people sacrificed," I am not being dramatic. I am counting. 17 percent in 2021, 46 percent in 2026. That trajectory tells the story of national resources massively diverted from the population toward the war. And the Russian people, who cannot vote freely, who cannot protest effectively, simply find themselves paying the bill for a military adventure they did not choose.

Healthcare, education, pensions: the sacrificed home front

In 2026, the Russian government has asked its non-military agencies to cut their spending by 10 percent. VAT has been raised to 22 percent — a direct increase in the cost of living for all Russians. Healthcare and education see their envelopes compressed. According to economist Janis Kluge, the monthly cost of the war — roughly 2 trillion rubles — exceeds the annual budget of the entire Russian higher education system (1.7 trillion) and the budget of all Russian regions except Moscow.

This is not an economic abstraction: it is concretely one month of war costing more than all Russian universities for an entire year. And in Russian hospitals, patients report medication shortages. Doctors testify — under cover of anonymity — to aging equipment that 2026 budgets no longer allow to be replaced. Pensions are being eroded by inflation that the Central Bank can no longer contain despite high benchmark rates.

Inflation: the hidden tax on the most vulnerable

The Russian inflation rate remains stubbornly high, fueled by massive military public spending that pumps rubles into the economy without producing consumer goods. The Central Bank has maintained benchmark rates near 14–15 percent in an attempt to contain that inflation — which in turn raises the cost of credit for households and businesses. Russian small businesses, already hit by sanctions and the flight of wealthier consumers abroad, are suffocating under these high rates.

For Russian retirees and fixed-income families, inflation is an invisible tax that gnaws at purchasing power without appearing in any budget law. They did not vote for the war. They cannot protest effectively. They watch their savings melt — while weapons factories run at full capacity a few hundred kilometers from their city.

Inflation as a war tax — economists name it soberly, but it has a very concrete human face. A grandmother in Saratov whose pension does not rise fast enough. A baker in Kazan whose raw material costs are surging. A student in Novosibirsk whose grants no longer cover the rent. These are the real financiers of Putin's war.

300,000 to 700,000 departures since 2022

The number that nobody in the Russian establishment wants to look at squarely: between 300,000 and 700,000 skilled Russians have left the country since the 2022 invasion. Software engineers, doctors, scientists, economists, entrepreneurs. It is an unprecedented hemorrhage of human capital in Russia's modern history. These people have gone to Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, Germany, the United States, Canada. And the vast majority will not return.

This exodus is directly linked to the 40 percent of the budget allocated to war: first, because mobilization drove away hundreds of thousands of men who did not want to fight in a war they did not understand. Then, because underinvestment in education, research and civilian sectors reduces the professional outlook for the most capable. A 40-percent-militarized Russia is not an attractive country for a young researcher or an innovative entrepreneur.

Erasing decades of economic development

The long-term cost of this brain drain is incalculable. Entire generations who would have innovated, built companies, trained students, developed technologies are now beyond Russia's reach. And meanwhile, the public resources that could have retained those talents — well-funded universities, equipped research laboratories, supported startups — are sacrificed in favor of rocket factories and assault battalions.

It is a vicious cycle that Russia cannot break while the war continues: the war drains civilian resources, reduced civilian resources drive away talent, departed talent weakens the future economy, the weakened economy struggles to fund the war — which then demands ever more. 40 percent of military budget today may mean 20 years of economic lag tomorrow.

I often think about the young Russians who packed their bags in 2022. They are not enemies of Russia — they may be its finest representatives: people who refused to participate in a collective crime. Russia lost its most mobile and most free talents. That is a loss no military budget can compensate for, regardless of its size.

The military boom masks civilian stagnation

Official Russian figures still show nominal economic growth in certain sectors — notably the defense industry and military construction. Moscow uses these numbers to claim the economy is "holding." But this growth is entirely endogenous to the war machine: defense funds defense, which creates jobs in defense, which generates revenues in defense. This is not economic development — it is circular militarism.

The civilian sectors that generate real wealth — agriculture, technology, services, consumption — are stagnating or regressing. Russian GDP per capita is declining in real terms since 2022 once adjusted for inflation. The World Bank and other institutions have cut their Russian growth forecasts for 2026–2028. The military boom is like a steroid: it gives the appearance of vigor while damaging vital organs.

The Siluanov paradox: spending the unsustainable

In a letter obtained by the Financial Times, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov warned in February 2026 that war spending was creating "mounting pressures" on the budget and risking a dangerous widening of the deficit. His solution: cut non-military spending, borrow more, and hope the war ends before the reserves run out.

This is not an economic strategy — it is a race to the edge. Siluanov knows perfectly well what he is doing: he is delaying collapse while knowing that every additional month of war at the current pace worsens the long-term situation. But he does not have the power to tell Putin to stop the war. He can only manage the unsustainable until something gives way. And something will eventually give way.

Siluanov may be the most tragic figure in this Russian story. He is sufficiently technocratic to understand where his country is headed, but too loyal — or too attached to his position — to state the truth publicly. His letter to the FT is not an act of courage: it is a document writing history for the post-Putin era. I hope that, for him and for Russia, that era comes soon.

The Russian media silence on economic reality

In Russia, most independent media have been silenced since 2022. Kommersant, one of the few still partially independent economic outlets, mentions rising prices and fuel tensions — without ever citing Ukrainian drone strikes on refineries as the direct cause. State propaganda maintains the fiction of a solid economy resisting sanctions through national strength.

But ordinary Russians do not live inside propaganda — they go shopping, pay their bills, see their doctors. And they see. Prices are rising. Medications are scarce. Roads and public buildings are less well maintained. The military budget may be hidden in statistics, but its effects on daily life are not. And in a country that has developed a culture of passive resignation, this accumulation of frustrations does not disappear — it waits.

Nine years in prison for 1,500 rubles: the cost of the freedom to speak

In June 2026, a Russian court sentenced a person to nine years in prison for a donation of 1,500 rubles to a political opposition group. To put it in perspective: 1,500 rubles is less than 20 euros. It is also less than one second of Russian military spending — since the war machine swallows 2.7 billion rubles per hour, or 750,000 rubles per second. This disproportion says everything: Russia punishes the slightest dissent with maximum severity while spending astronomical fortunes on a war that its own financiers consider unsustainable.

This context of crushing every freedom of expression is a crucial component of the sacrifice imposed on the Russian people. Not only are their resources confiscated for war — their ability to express disagreement is criminalized. The double sacrifice: money and voice.

Nine years for 1,500 rubles. Meanwhile, 2.7 billion rubles per hour go into the war. That disproportion is obscene. It says everything about a regime that treats the citizen as a subject to be taxed, not a person to be served. Russia in 2026 is a state that punishes freedom and rewards violence. And the Russian people know it — even if they cannot say so.

The precedents that frighten

Soviet history offers a troubling mirror. In the 1980s, the USSR devoted between 15 and 25 percent of its GDP to military spending — an unsustainable level that contributed, combined with Gorbachev's reforms, to the regime's collapse in 1991. Russia in 2026 is approaching similar levels: 9 to 12 percent of GDP in quarterly military spending, according to Kluge's projections. Economists at SIPRI and SWP note this troubling resemblance to the Soviet trajectory.

But there are important differences. The USSR of 1980 had a planned economy, a non-convertible currency, and complete isolation from global markets. Russia in 2026 is more integrated into the world economy — even diminished by sanctions — and has more sophisticated internal financial markets. These factors could give it more resilience in the face of budget pressures. But they do not change the fundamental dynamic: an economy that devotes 40 to 48 percent of its budget to the military is no longer oriented toward the well-being of its population.

The Afghan lesson Putin forgot

In 1979, the USSR invaded Afghanistan expecting a quick victory. Ten years and thousands of deaths later, it withdrew, exhausted, discredited, and on the slope that led to its collapse. Vladimir Putin studied that history. He claims to have learned from it. And yet, in 2022, he reproduced exactly the same mistake — an invasion war expected to end in days, which has now lasted more than four years and is consuming resources at a rate that the USSR itself would not have sustained for long. The irony of history is sometimes cruel.

The Russian people did not choose this war. They were not consulted. They were forcibly enrolled, financially and militarily, in an imperial project that is not theirs. And every military budget statistic — 40 percent, 46 percent, 48 percent — is a measure of the scale of the sacrifice being imposed on them. The judgment of history, which does not lie, will be unsparing.

Putin and Afghanistan — the parallel is tempting, but we must remain cautious. The USSR had vulnerabilities that Russia does not all share. But the direction is the same: a costly war, with no clear victory, weighing ever more heavily on a population that never really said yes. History rarely repeats itself identically. But it repeats.

Men torn from their ordinary lives

The partial mobilization decreed in September 2022 and its silent extensions since have torn hundreds of thousands of men from their families, their jobs, their lives. According to estimates from independent Russian organizations, more than 1.2 million Russians have been killed, wounded, captured or reported missing since the start of the full-scale war. Behind every figure is a family waiting, a child growing up without a father, a woman alone carrying the household's responsibilities.

These families receive no clear answers from the Kremlin on the fate of their loved ones. Groups of Russian soldiers' mothers, similar to those that emerged during the Afghanistan war and the first Chechen war, are trying to organize despite repression. Their voices are stifled, their demands ignored. This institutional silence in the face of the suffering of Russian families is a moral betrayal that history will remember.

Prisoners of war and the missing

The fate of Russian prisoners of war held by Ukraine is a subject Moscow approaches with reluctance. Several prisoner exchanges have taken place — Ukraine recently freed 160 Ukrainian soldiers in a recent swap — but thousands of others remain held on both sides. Russian families trying to obtain information about their loved ones hit a wall of bureaucracy and denial. The Russian state treats its own soldiers as disposable resources, not as citizens whose lives have value.

This indifference toward the fate of Russian combatants — once their military usefulness is exhausted — is the hallmark of regimes that instrumentalize national suffering for their own ends. Russian soldiers who return wounded, traumatized, often without psychological support or reintegration assistance, discover that the state that sent them to the front has no plan to welcome them back. That is the true face of the regime behind its speeches about the great Russia.

I am not saying that Russian soldiers are all innocent victims — they are participating in an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign people. But I refuse to deny their humanity. These are men, often from Russia's poorest regions, who had little real choice but to obey. Their suffering is real, even if their cause is unjust. And it is Putin, not Ukraine, who inflicted this fate on them.

Mothers, wives and sisters carrying the weight of war

Behind the military and economic statistics of this war lies a human reality too rarely mentioned: the Russian women who carry the weight of absence, anxiety and overload. When men are mobilized, it is women who alone take on raising children, caring for the elderly, handling the household's financial responsibilities. This invisible burden appears in no official economic indicator — but it is eroding the social fabric of Russian society.

Groups of women in Russia have tried, at the risk of their freedom, to organize and demand the return of their loved ones and an end to the war. These courageous voices, quickly repressed by the authorities, are a reminder that opposition to the war exists in Russia — it is simply gagged. Any analogy with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo or the women of Chechnya is powerless against a regime that has perfected methods of repression.

The propaganda that normalizes death

One of the most disturbing dimensions of this war is the regime's capacity to normalize death in public discourse. The colossal losses — officially minimized, actually devastating — are presented as heroic sacrifice for the homeland. Coffins return to villages, obituaries are published quietly in regional newspapers, but the official narrative maintains the illusion of a clean and victorious war.

This propaganda has its limits: it works less well in the regions where losses are proportionally highest — often the poorest, least educated, most dependent on the state. It is there that resentment grows most silently. Deep Russia — those regions far from Moscow that cameras do not reach — pays a disproportionate price for a war decided in the palaces of the Kremlin. And that moral debt, one day, will have to be settled.

This opinion piece is also for all those ordinary Russians who endure a war they did not choose, in the silence imposed by a regime that deprives them of their right to truth. They are not our enemies — they are one man's hostages. And their suffering, though different from that of Ukrainians, is just as real. When peace comes, it will have to do justice to them as well.

The anger before the numbers

I claim no neutrality in this piece. The numbers I have written — 40 percent, 46 percent, 48 percent, 53 trillion rubles since 2022, 2.7 billion per hour — are not neutral. They describe a sacrifice imposed by force on an entire people, in the name of an imperial project that its own economic elite considers unsustainable. That is a monumental injustice that the world will look squarely in the eye when this war is over.

Hope in Ukrainian resistance

Ukraine is fighting for its survival. But it is also fighting, indirectly, to free the Russian people from a regime that is sacrificing them. Every sanction that reduces Russian state revenues, every drone that disrupts a refinery, every dollar of Western support that strengthens Ukrainian defenses — all of this accelerates the exhaustion of a system that can only survive by continuing to consume its own people. When that spiral stops, it will also be — perhaps — the beginning of freedom for Russia.

I end this piece with a thought that never left me as I wrote it: the Russian people deserve better. Better than Putin. Better than this war. Better than 40 percent of their budget stolen by a war machine they do not control. They deserve it — and I believe they know it. Perhaps that is why dictatorships are so afraid of their own populations. Even the most silent ones have a memory.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. I claim analytical clarity, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

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This text keeps the basic distinction between verified facts and interpretive analysis. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under Sources, never here.

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Nature of the analysis

The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a critical, contextual synthesis based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted.

My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors.

This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text.