Authors

Kacper Wańczyk¹;  ¹ War Studies University, Poland

Discussion

Russia and Belarus are members of the military alliance of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation. Even within that organisation, the two countries have deeper military cooperation to the extent that many experts asses that the Belarusian military is subordinated to the Russian command. Moreover, the two countries are engaged in the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. For these reasons, it seems appropriate to look at the two countries jointly from the point of view of security. 

Since the beginning of the Cold War, many organisations and researchers have been trying to assess the real level of military spending in the USSR and Russia. The approaches varied – from the UN’s gathering of the Moscow declared data through the CIA’s “building blocks” method to more elaborated Sweden’s SIPRI methodology. 

After 1991, Belarus, as an independent state, was included in some of these projects. The 2000s, and particularly post-2014 work, brought into the mix the understanding that since Belarus and Russia are using non-traditional elements of the security system in a military context, the analysis of the spending should be expanded outside the strictly military part of the state budget. 

Those approaches sought to get as close to reality as possible a picture of the Kremlin’s military expenditures. There were two main goals of these works. Some projects aimed at predicting how military spending would affect the stability of the Soviet and then the Belarus and Russian economies. The objective of the second type of research was to compare Moscow’s expenditure in that area to other countries. In some cases, the reason was to observe the tendencies of the global military market. In other – the assessment of spending was an argument for increasing the own security expenses. 

I believe that the current Russian military expansion calls for a review of the approaches that were the basis for earlier research on Soviet, Belarusian and Russian military spending. First, we can see that security spending is crucial for the Kremlin, and it is prepared to cut spending in other budget lines to provide funds for the security sector. Accepting this thesis, we no longer need to focus on the influence of funds spent on the military sector on the overall economy. 

The other assumption is that we should use the state budget as a tool to understand the financial flows in the security sphere in time rather than trying to asses the security sector’s spending scale. Looking at the dynamics of details of budget planning and execution in the period 2013-2024 would allow for tracking these processes. This will help explain how Minsk and Moscow manage the finances of the security sector.