Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law on Russia's record military budget. For the first time since the Soviet times, spending on the army and military-industrial complex will account for a third of the country's total expenditures, The Moscow Times reports.

"For the year, the budget will spend 10.775 trillion rubles ($111 billion) under the 'national defense' item, which is 70% more than in 2023 (6.8 trillion rubles/76 billion dollars), 2.3 times more than in 2022 (4.7 trillion rubles/52 billion dollars), and three times higher than in pre-war 2021 (3.5 trillion rubles/39 billion dollars)," the report says.


The share of military spending will reach 29.5%, while only 19% was budgeted for 2023 and 17% for 2022. 


Such figures were in the last years of the USSR. According to the archives of former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, the journalists continue in the article, the government allocated 29.4% of the Soviet Union's budget for 1990 to "military purposes."

Special attention is paid to the article "national security," which includes the budgets of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Rosgvardia, special services, and the FPS system. About 3.3 trillion rubles ($37 billion) will go there. As a result, it turns out that Russia's law enforcement agencies will receive almost 40% of the total budget in 2024.

It should be noted that the share of military items in Ukraine's budget for the next year is half of all expenditures. This is 1.68 trillion hryvnias (about $46 billion).