DECODING: Cannibal Putin — 48% of the Russian budget swallowed by war, per Rutte

Introduction: A figure that makes your head spin

When Rutte drops a bombshell over Brussels

On June 18, 2026, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Secretary General Mark Rutte uttered a sentence that should make every chancery in Europe tremble. Speaking before Allied Defense Ministers gathered for their pre-Ankara summit meeting, he cited fresh data from Russia’s own financial records: Russia now devotes 48% of its entire state budget to defense — up from 40% just a few months ago. This eight-percentage-point jump in such a short time is no ordinary budget adjustment. It is the sign of a state devouring itself.

Rutte's exact words, recorded in the official transcript of the NATO press conference, are unambiguous: "When you look at Russia more generally, don't forget the latest numbers you can see from Russia coming is that they spent, it was 40%, now it is 48% of all the state budget is now spent on defence. 48%. That means that from the tax income Moscow is getting about 75 of the tax income is now spent on defence. These are crazy numbers." Figures he himself describes as "crazy". He isn’t wrong. These percentages no longer describe a war economy, but a war machine financed by the deliberate sacrifice of an entire economy.

A strategic context that makes this data explosive

This statement doesn't happen in a vacuum. It comes six weeks before the NATO summit in Ankara, as allies negotiate the historic target of 5% of GDP for defense by 2035. In this context, Rutte was trying to convince the doubters: no, it's not paranoia. Look at Russia. Look at what it’s doing. It is mobilizing three-quarters of its tax revenue to fuel a single war, a single ambition: to crush Ukraine and reconfigure the European order according to the imperial vision of Vladimir Putin.

The West's response must be equal to the challenge — and it starts with understanding the scale of the phenomenon. Because behind that 48%, it isn't just about missiles and tanks. It is about a structural transformation of Russia into an integral militarist state, on the most extreme Soviet model, with one crucial difference: resources are incomparably more limited than in the days of the USSR.

The raw figures: 48% of the budget, 75% of tax revenue

What 48% of the state budget actually means

To measure the absurdity of the Russian situation, we need context. In France, military spending represents about 2 to 3% of GDP — a tiny fraction of the state budget. In the United States, even at the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon never consumed more than 20% of the federal budget. Russia, in 2026, is devoting almost half of every ruble spent by the central state. Concretely, this means that healthcare, education, infrastructure, pensions, and the social fabric survive on the other half — which is shrinking as revenues collapse.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and economist Janis Kluge, a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, provided precise quantitative corroboration as early as June 12, 2026, six days before Rutte's statement. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, Russian military spending reached 5.9 trillion rubles — approximately $81.4 billion, representing 46% of all federal budget expenditures. This is a 30% increase compared to the first quarter of 2025. And this happened even though the 2026 budget had officially planned for a reduction in military spending.

75% of tax revenue: the killer figure

But the most brutal figure — the one Rutte spoke and that few analysts have yet fully grasped — is tax revenue. 75% of everything the Russian state collects in taxes from its own citizens and companies now goes directly into the war machine. During the first four months of 2026, total revenues reached only 8.3 trillion rubles, or about $114.5 billion, according to Kluge's calculations published by ISW. Yet military spending for the first quarter alone had already absorbed two-thirds of that amount. The trajectory is one of irreversible fiscal cannibalization.

Worse: this money doesn't fall from the sky. Russia raised its VAT from 20% to 22% in January 2026 — a tax hike explicitly justified by the Kremlin as intended to "finance defense and security." The ordinary Russian citizen, the artisan, the shopkeeper, the SME: they are now paying more taxes to fuel a war that Vladimir Putin unleashed unilaterally and refuses to stop.

The hidden escalation: from 40% to 48% in a few months

An increase the Kremlin tried to mask

We must remember that in December 2025, during a previous meeting of NATO Foreign Ministers, Rutte had already cited the figure of 40% of the state budget devoted to defense — which already represented an absolute record since the Soviet era. At the time, Moscow had even officially budgeted a slight reduction in military spending for 2026, dropping from 13.5 to 12.6 trillion rubles. This apparent retreat masked the reality: classified spending, meanwhile, was exploding. According to the ISW, classified items in the Russian federal budget increased by 43% in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period in 2025, and represented 38.2% of all federal spending. Now, Russia's own budget document stipulates that 85% of classified spending goes to the military.

In other words: the Kremlin was playing with definitions. It was reducing the official "national defense" line to reassure markets and analysts, while massively transferring those credits to opaque items. The result: when Rutte says 48%, he is citing a real figure, derived from data from the Russian Ministry of Finance itself — the only data available, incomplete but telling. The actual reality could be even higher. German intelligence (BND) estimated in February 2026 that actual 2025 military spending was 66% higher than official figures.

The first quarter of 2026: a machine spiraling out of control

The figures from Janis Kluge for the first quarter of 2026 are particularly striking in their precision. The Russian war machine consumed an average of 65 billion rubles per day — nearly $916 million every 24 hours. Monthly, this represents about 2 trillion rubles, or $28.2 billion. Extrapolating these trends, Kluge estimates that Russian military spending could reach 9 to 10% of GDP in 2026 — double what the Kremlin had officially planned. A country that devotes 10% of its entire national wealth to a single war is no longer in a managed war economy. It is in a reckless financial flight.

The SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) confirms the underlying dynamic: Russian military spending had already reached $190 billion in 2025, or 7.5% of GDP — the highest ratio ever recorded for Russia and among the highest in the world. The progression toward 48% of the budget in 2026 is no accident. It is the logical continuation of a strategy that Putin fully embraces: militarizing the state to the bone, regardless of the social and economic consequences.

The anatomy of a cannibal state

When defense crushes everything else

To understand what 48% of the budget for defense means, one must understand what is left for everything else. According to Russian budget data available before the massive classification of items, social policy represented 16% of the budget in 2026 — compared to 38% before the war. Infrastructure, education, and health are being squeezed year after year. 56 of the 85 Russian regions showed budget deficits in 2026, according to a joint report by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics — two-thirds of the country in a state of structural financial shortage. Local governments can no longer fund the bonuses paid to soldiers' families, a burden that has more than doubled according to the ISW.

The Kremlin solved the equation in its own way: by shifting the bill to the taxpayers. The VAT increase from 20% to 22% on January 1, 2026, primarily hits the most modest households and small businesses. The threshold for VAT liability for small structures was lowered from 60 million to 10 million rubles in annual turnover — equivalent to the income of a hair salon or a neighborhood grocery store. Russia’s smallest entrepreneurs are thus financing the missiles falling on Kyiv.

An economy that slows down while the war accelerates

The cruel irony of the Russian situation lies in this gaping gap: the more the military machine accelerates, the more the civilian economy is asphyxiated. Russian GDP growth, which had surprised favorably in 2023 and 2024 thanks to the stimulus of war spending, fell to 0.4% for 2026 according to new forecasts from the Russian Ministry of Economic Development — a third of the projections from September 2025. Over the first four months of 2026, growth was even 0.2% at an annual rate. The budget deficit for the first five months of 2026 already reached 6 trillion rubles, or 2.6% of GDP — 60% above the annual target. According to Bloomberg, the deficit over a rolling twelve-month period exceeded 8 trillion rubles.

The Russian Central Bank, meanwhile, is trying to navigate between two fatal reefs: structural inflation generated by militarization and the need to keep interest rates low enough not to stifle the war industry. Elvira Nabiullina, Governor of the Central Bank, acknowledged on June 19, 2026 — the day after Rutte's statement — that the spike in fuel prices linked to Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries worsens inflationary pressures and could force a revision of monetary calculations. At the same time, under pressure from the Kremlin, the Bank lowered its key rate to 14.25% — a contradiction the ISW describes as a sign of erosion of the Central Bank's independence in favor of the war machine.

The comparison that humiliates Moscow: Russia is no bigger than Belgium and the Netherlands

Rutte twists the knife

In that same press conference on June 18, Rutte added an observation that must be hammered home incessantly in Western capitals: "Russia is not bigger than Belgium and the Netherlands combined." Russia, in terms of GDP, is no larger than the combination of Belgium and the Netherlands. This comparison is not anecdotal. It gives the real measure of the economic balance of power. A power that bombs Europe, threatens NATO members, and has martyred Ukraine for over four years — yet has an economy comparable to two small Western European countries with a combined population of fewer than 30 million people.

It is precisely this contrast that explains why Russia must devote 48% of its budget to defense: its economic base is too narrow to maintain a superpower military machine without swallowing almost all of its tax resources. The USSR could devote 15 to 25% of its GDP to defense because it had a centralized economy of 290 million people. Putin's Russia, with an economy of 140 million people and heavily dependent on sanctioned hydrocarbons, does not have that latitude. It compensates through a proportional effort that destroys the foundations of its own future development.

The scissor effect: falling revenues, skyrocketing spending

Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure — refineries, fuel depots, oil terminals — are not just tactical successes. They have a measurable and growing economic effect. The Moscow refinery (Kapotnya refinery) suspended operations after the strikes of June 18, 2026, according to the ISW. The gasoline shortage spread to 70 Russian regions in early June 2026. At some gas stations, selling in jerry cans is prohibited. According to sources cited by the ISW, fuel restrictions affect nearly 25% of Russian gas stations, including the 2,200 Rosneft stations. Russia is considering importing fuel from Asia — an unprecedented logistical humiliation for one of the world's leading oil producers.

This degradation of refining capacity has a direct impact on tax revenues, which are crumbling precisely as military spending explodes. The scissor effect is relentless: less oil and gas revenue under sanctions, less economic growth, more taxed ordinary taxpayers, and a war machine that always demands more. Russian public debt, long one of Putin's favorite arguments for boasting about the strength of his model, is starting to creak: according to Bloomberg's calculations, Russia could devote the equivalent of 15% of its GDP to debt service alone over the next ten years — a burden equivalent to its entire current debt.

What war funding reveals: Putin’s strategy exposed

Ukraine as a budgetary obsession

Since the launch of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, total Russian military spending has reached, according to economist Janis Kluge's calculations, 53,079 billion rubles — approximately $746.6 billion. Three-quarters of a trillion dollars. To finance this colossal sum, the Kremlin has made choices that define the real nature of its regime: cutting healthcare, cutting education, cutting civilian infrastructure, taxing small entrepreneurs, selling national reserves, and borrowing massively at rates that stifle the economy. This sum is not a bookkeeping anomaly: it is the quantified manifestation of Putin's personal obsession with erasing Ukraine from the map.

And yet, this astronomical sum was not enough. In four and a half years, Russia has not taken Kyiv. It has not annihilated the Ukrainian armed forces. It has not broken the resistance of a people. On the contrary, it has awakened a determination that even the most optimistic would not have dared to predict in 2022. According to Rutte himself during the June 18 conference, Ukraine is holding its positions and making small net gains — a notable shift from the situation four to five months ago. Russian losses, according to Rutte, reach 30,000 to 35,000 men killed every month — figures he describes as "striking."

The Russian army: quantity vs quality, at what cost

These colossal human losses are themselves a growing budgetary expense. Recruitment bonuses and compensation to families of killed soldiers have more than doubled since the start of the war. These payments exert considerable pressure on federal and regional budgets. According to Ukrainian sources cited by the ISW, tax revenues from corporate profits have dropped by 12% in some Russian regions, while 56 out of 85 regions are in deficit. The Russian economy is now operating at full capacity in only one sector — the war industry — while the rest stagnates, choked by high interest rates, a labor shortage caused by mobilizations, and persistent inflation.

The paradox is brutal: Russian soldiers dying in Ukraine cost more to replace than their tactical value on the ground. Each killed soldier represents a bonus paid to his family, a replacement to be recruited with a higher signing bonus, and a worker absent from the civilian economy. The structurally low unemployment in Russia — which Putin presents as a "success" — is actually the sign of an acute labor shortage caused by the war, as ISW analysts have noted.

NATO's reaction: 5% of GDP or the survival of the West

Rutte sets the course for Ankara

Faced with this data, Rutte did not stop at observation. The meeting of Defense Ministers on June 18, 2026, had a central objective: to prepare the ground for the NATO summit in Ankara, scheduled for late summer, by consolidating the collective commitment to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, including 3.5% for military capabilities in the strict sense. A goal deemed unthinkable just two years ago, but which is becoming the norm in an alliance that is finally taking the measure of the threat.

The figures presented by Rutte during this meeting are encouraging: European allies and Canada increased their defense spending by more than $90 billion in real terms in 2025, a 20% increase in a single year — the highest increase in decades. In nominal terms, this represents an additional $139 billion. Some allies will reach the 5% threshold this year. The momentum is there, even if the effort must be sustained and amplified over the long term.

The ambiguous role of the United States in the reconfiguration of NATO

The meeting was also marked by statements from US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who announced a review of US forces deployed in Europe and warned that the United States could reduce its contribution to the NATO Response Force if allies did not fulfill their financial commitments. Reductions which, according to Rutte himself, have already begun — notably affecting tankers, fighter jets, drones, and ships. This paradox — a US administration demanding more from NATO while reducing its own presence — illustrates what many analysts describe as the Trump as a "necessary evil" posture for the alliance: a pressure that forces Europeans to take responsibility, even if the methods rattle partners.

But this internal NATO context must not lose sight of the essential: the Russian threat is real, documented, and growing. Rutte cited open intelligence from several European agencies estimating that Russia could be in a position to militarily threaten NATO members by 2029. Not in some distant and abstract future. In three years. And the alliance's response must be to show itself stronger in 2027, 2029, and 2031 — so that Moscow understands that an attack would be "their biggest mistake," as Rutte says.

Ukraine: resilience as a response to Russian obsession

Zelensky holds, and the alliance holds behind him

While Putin was cannibalizing his economy to finance his war, Volodymyr Zelensky achieved something many thought impossible in February 2022: maintaining the resistance of an invaded country, organizing an army almost from scratch, and keeping the support of a Western coalition that wavered but held. Announcements made during the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting on June 18, 2026, illustrate this solidarity: Germany delivered a new IRIS-T system, the United Kingdom announced the supply of 150,000 Ukrainian-made drones and over 350 air defense missiles as part of a £750 million package. Total commitments for the session reached approximately $4 billion, according to early estimates.

Even more significant: Ukraine has developed a strategy of deep strikes against Russian industrial and logistical capabilities that is beginning to produce documented economic effects. Strikes on refineries have led to fuel shortages in 70 Russian regions. The Kapotnya refinery in Moscow has ceased operations. Nabiullina herself acknowledged that these strikes affect Russian inflation. Zelensky understood what Clausewitz formulated differently: to destroy the opponent's economic capacity is to destroy their capacity to wage war. And he is applying it methodically with the means available.

The Ukrainian model: a sustainable war economy?

At 40% of GDP devoted to defense in 2025 — according to SIPRI — Ukraine itself is in an extreme situation. But with a fundamental difference: international support compensates for a massive portion of this effort. The billions of euros and dollars provided by the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other allies allow the Ukrainian economy to continue functioning without collapsing under the weight of the war effort. Russia, however, finances alone — with exhausting reserves, falling revenues, and rising debt.

This asymmetry is fundamental: Ukraine fights with the support of Western civilization behind it. Russia fights with North Korean shell deliveries and Iranian drones, without genuine large-scale economic support from China. If the West maintains and amplifies its support — a vital condition that Rutte hammered home — the equation of time plays against Moscow. Because 48% of the budget for defense cannot last indefinitely. Not with an economy the size of Belgium and the Netherlands combined.

The war debt: a financial time bomb

The National Wealth Fund, the last shield, is evaporating

Before the war, Russia prided itself on "orthodox" financial management: low public debt (23% of GDP according to the IMF), significant foreign exchange reserves, and a robust National Wealth Fund (NWF) exceeding $130 billion. In 2026, the picture is radically different. The NWF was reduced to about $50 billion at the start of 2025. Available liquid assets are almost exhausted. In November 2025, the Kremlin had to start selling gold reserves to finance the deficit — a decision Putin had specifically tried to avoid to maintain the image of an economically invulnerable Russia.

Russia has also reached its legal public debt ceiling and will have to raise it to finance future deficits. According to sources cited by Bloomberg, the government will need to raise between 2 and 3 trillion additional rubles through borrowing. The cost of debt has doubled since the start of the war. In 2026, Russia will devote nearly 4 trillion rubles — 9% of the federal budget — to debt service alone. And this figure will grow every year as loans taken at high rates reach maturity. Bloomberg’s ten-year projection — 15% of GDP for interest — looks like self-inflicted financial punishment.

Russian regions pay the price for military centralization

The centralization of the war effort in Moscow has dramatic consequences for Russian regions. 56 out of 85 regions are in budget deficit in 2026, according to estimates. Regional governments are forced to assume a growing share of the bonuses paid to soldiers' families — burdens that have exploded with military losses. In parallel, regional revenues are collapsing: corporate profit tax has dropped by 12% in many regions, according to data compiled by the ISW and German and Swedish economic institutes. Deep Russia is bleeding financially to fund a war that Moscow decided alone.

This regional picture raises a question no one dares to ask openly in Russia: how much longer will the regions accept financing this war? Regional governors are appointed by Putin and have no political room for maneuver. But the social pressure linked to the degradation of public services, rising prices, and fuel shortages creates a dull tension that the regime cannot indefinitely ignore. Cracks are starting to be heard — even if, for now, they have no public voice.

Historical precedents: when states militarize themselves to exhaustion

The USSR as a distorted mirror

History offers few lasting precedents of states devoting 40 to 50% of their budgets to military effort in times of relative peace with their direct neighbors. The Soviet Union at the peak of the Cold War approached these levels — and its economic collapse, which Gorbachev tried to halt with perestroika, resulted largely from this excessive militarization. The paradox is that Putin's Russia, which wants to be the heir to Soviet greatness, is reproducing exactly the mistakes that led the USSR to its dissolution: over-militarization, a rent-seeking economy dependent on raw materials, stagnation of the civilian sector, and growing hostility toward an economically and technologically superior West.

The crucial difference with the USSR is the relative size of the economies. In 1980, the Soviet GDP represented about 40% of the US GDP. The Russia of 2026 represents less than 10% of the US GDP. It cannot, therefore, indefinitely sustain a war effort comparable in proportion — even relative — to that of the USSR. The 48% of the budget for defense is not a sign of strength: it is a sign that Russia no longer has the means to wage war except by sacrificing everything else.

When time becomes Moscow's enemy

Economist Janis Kluge proposed an alarming but logical projection: if military spending continues on its trajectory from the first quarter of 2026, it could reach 9 to 10% of GDP for the year. Such a level, combined with stagnant growth, falling oil revenues under sanctions, and the inexorable rise of debt, creates a trajectory of fiscal exhaustion in the medium term. It’s not a question of if, but when. And Ukraine's allies have an interest in making sure the answer is "before Putin gets what he wants."

The most optimistic scenario is that Russia finds itself forced, in the next two to three years, to seek a diplomatic agreement not through strategic will but through financial necessity. Rutte himself alluded to this perspective: "Obviously, Putin one day has got to take a decision whether he wants to play ball or not." Putin’s time is numbered — but only if the West keeps its promise to keep Ukraine as strong as possible until that moment.

Russian war industry: between overproduction and structural limits

Weaponry production pushed to the extreme

One of the most paradoxical phenomena of the Russian war economy is that this extreme militarization of the budget has indeed produced tangible results on production lines. According to various analysis sources, Russia has massively increased its production rate of artillery shells, drones, missiles, and armored vehicles. This industrial capacity is Putin’s central argument for justifying the continuation of the war: as long as the factories are running, losses on the front can be replaced. This is why Ukrainian strikes on defense industrial sites — and on the energy infrastructure that fuels them — are so strategically important.

But this military industrial production also has limits. Shortages of skilled labor, worsened by military mobilization, are beginning to affect even defense plants. Imports of high-tech components — microprocessors, optics, guidance systems — remain constrained by sanctions despite bypasses via third countries. And the growing dependence on North Korean shells and Iranian drones reveals the limits of a national industrial base insufficient for the needs of the war.

The tyranny of classified spending

One of the most concerning aspects of this situation for Western analysts is the growing opacity of the Russian military budget. According to SIPRI and economist Julian Cooper, 84% of the Russian military budget is classified for the year 2026 — making any precise independent verification of the figures impossible. This is why Rutte’s estimates — and Kluge’s — are based on analysis of partial data from the Russian Ministry of Finance, cross-referenced with intelligence from Western agencies.

The German BND estimated in February 2026 that actual 2025 military spending was 66% higher than official figures, reaching about 250 billion euros. If this 66% premium were applied to 2026 data, the true 48% figure would be even more alarming than the one mentioned by Rutte — potentially close to 60 to 70% of the actual budget. We may only be seeing the tip of the iceberg.

Social consequences in Russia: a society under silent pressure

Inflation, fuel, and degraded daily life

For ordinary Russians, Putin's war economy translates into concrete and painful daily realities. Official annual inflation is 5.4% as of June 1, 2026, according to data from the Russian Central Bank — but this figure masks much higher increases in essential sectors. Fuel, whose shortage now affects 70 regions of the country, directly impacts transport and heating costs. The VAT increase to 22% has made all consumer goods more expensive. The cost of living is rising structurally faster than salaries in the civilian sector.

The only exception: salaries in the military and defense sector, which have exploded under the effect of recruitment bonuses and arms contracts. This income differential between the civilian and military-industrial sectors creates deep labor market distortions — and explains this "full employment" that Putin celebrates: it is not prosperity, it is the suction of labor into the military apparatus. Doctors, engineers, and teachers who could work in the civilian sector prefer to join better-paid arms factories — at the expense of public services.

The forced silence of a society under surveillance

What is striking about the Russian situation is the almost total absence of organized resistance to this militarization of the economy. The law on "discrediting the army" criminalizes any public criticism of the war. Economists, journalists, and experts who paint a critical picture of the Russian economy do so from exile — from Riga, Tbilisi, Berlin, or Paris. In Russia itself, public discourse is locked down. Those who know — the officials at the Ministry of Finance, the bankers, the state economists — only speak in hushed tones, in technocratic reports that no one outside the circles of power is supposed to read.

But cracks exist. The financial regulator itself — the Central Bank — sends contradictory signals. The Russian press under orders lets through articles on "budgetary tensions." Regional officials discreetly mention difficulties in financing military bonuses. Russia is a society under pressure, not a dead society. And history teaches us that pressure, when it becomes unbearable, eventually finds a way out — even in the most authoritarian regimes.

What the West must remember: urgency, lucidity, solidarity

Do not be lulled by talk of Russian "stabilization"

One of the most dangerous mistakes the West can make is to believe that because Russia is "holding up" economically, it is invulnerable. The resilience of the Russian economy since 2022 is real but superficial. It rests on unsustainable mechanisms: draining national reserves, tax increases on households, growing borrowing at high rates, and the militarization of an economy whose civilian productive base is withering. The trajectory described by Rutte’s 48%, Kluge’s projections, and SIPRI’s analyses is one of progressive exhaustion — not stabilization.

The Carnegie Endowment, in an October 2025 analysis, formulated it precisely: Russia is not stabilizing its public finances through economic growth or opening markets. It is stabilizing them through successive tax hikes, financial repression, and costly loans — instruments that weaken the foundations of the economy in the long term while financing war in the short term. It is a strategy that can work for a few years. Not a decade. And certainly not if Ukraine continues to strike Russian energy and industrial infrastructure effectively.

Time, coordination, and firmness as answers

The West's response must revolve around three axes. First, maintain and amplify military support for Ukraine — not out of romanticism or ideology, but because every Ukrainian drone that hits a Russian refinery represents additional economic stress on Putin's regime. Second, accelerate the transition to 5% of GDP for Allied defense: not to prepare for war with Russia, but to discourage any ambition to extend the conflict beyond Ukraine. Rutte is right: if Russia knows it cannot win against NATO, it will not try. Finally, strengthen sanctions on Russian energy capabilities, in particular on bypasses via third countries that still allow Moscow to import the high-tech components its war industry needs.

These three axes are not ideological options. They are rational responses to cold economic analysis. Putin’s Russia is running toward fiscal exhaustion. The West has the strategic advantage. The question is whether we will have the lucidity and consistency to maintain it until this exhaustion produces its effects — without wavering, without yielding to premature calls for compromise that would allow Putin to breathe and start over.

Conclusion: The pitiless arithmetic of a war Putin cannot afford to lose — nor to win

A state devouring itself

On June 18, 2026, by citing this 48% figure before NATO Defense Ministers, Mark Rutte did something decisive: he put simple words to a complex reality that too many Western leaders still hesitate to name clearly. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is no longer a normal economy engaged in a war effort. It is a state that has reversed its fundamental priorities, sacrificing the future of its citizens — their health, their education, their pensions, their prosperity — on the altar of an imperial geopolitical vision that neither history, nor international law, nor the will of the people concerned can validate. The equation of 75% of tax revenue swallowed by defense is that of a cannibal state: it feeds on itself to continue existing in its monstrous form.

This arithmetic is pitiless in one sense: it describes the scale of the sacrifice Putin imposes on his people to sustain his war. But it also carries a strategic truth that the West must grasp and use: such intensity of budgetary militarization cannot last indefinitely. Reserves are running dry, debt is rising, regions are becoming poorer, civilian businesses are stagnating, and citizens are paying ever heavier taxes for a war that brings them nothing. Russia is running toward exhaustion — provided the West does not offer it a premature exit that would allow it to consolidate its gains, recharge, and start again.

History is watching us

Ukraine resists. NATO is strengthening. Allies are meeting their commitments, laboriously but really — an additional $90 billion in 2025, the 5% GDP peaks in sight. And Russia, despite its facade of power, is spending half its budget to sustain a war it was supposed to win in three days in February 2022. The contrast could not be more telling. The outcome of this conflict will depend on our perseverance as much as on Moscow's economic data. Rutte’s figures give us a compass. It’s up to us not to lose sight of it.

Signed Maxime Marquette, columnist

Sources

Sources primaires

Official transcript of Rutte's press conference (NATO) — June 18, 2026

ISW — Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 19, 2026

Euromaidan Press / ISW — Russia poured 46% of its budget into the military in early 2026 — June 14, 2026

Sources secondaires

UK Defence Journal — Russia pouring half its budget into war, Rutte says — June 20, 2026

RBC-Ukraine / Bloomberg — Putin's economic shield weakens as war costs mount — June 18, 2026

SIPRI — Military spending in Russia’s budget for 2026, fifth year of war — March 19, 2026

Meduza — High oil prices and tax hikes aren’t enough to keep Russia’s budget on track — June 9, 2026

UNN — Rutte says Putin must decide if he wants negotiations, reveals Russia's war spending — June 18, 2026