Erik Andermo and Martin Kragh, “Secrecy and Military Expenditures in the Russian Budget” , was published online today by Post-Soviet Affairs. A pre-print version, free to download, can be found here.

The article provides new data on Russian secrecy and military expenditures, and shows how secrecy has increased in the last few years. The level of military expenditures, we argue, should be analyzed in context. Here is the abstract:

“This article proposes a transparent method for collecting, structuring and analyzing Russian budget data on defence and security-related expenditures. A precise answer to the question of how big Russia’s defence expenditures are is impossible because of issues concerning secrecy and accounting principles. We circumvent this challenge by constructing lower and upper bounds for Russia’s military expenditure, showing that depending on the chosen measure these have increased from the range 10.3–31.2 % of federal expenditures in 2011 to 12.9–35.4 % in 2018. The analysis also yields additional insights into the concept of secrecy in the Russian budget; we show that 39 out of 96 subchapters in the Russian budget contain secret expenditures, many of which are not nominally defence- or security-related, and that secret expenditures increased as a share of total expenditures from 12 % to 17 % between 2011 and 2019.”