This is probably not a timing coincidence. The day Vladimir Putin signed a decree on autumn conscription, the Russian government unveiled, for its 2025 budget bill, a record increase in military spending. The head of the Kremlin on Monday, September 30, ordered that more than 130,000 Russians aged 18 to 30 be sent to military service by the end of the year. At the same time, the Ministry of Finance announced a 30% increase in the defense budget. The message is clear: more than two and a half years after the launch of “special military operation” of the Kremlin in Ukraine, almost two months after the expansion of the fighting in Russia since the incursion of the Ukrainian army in the Kursk region, the president and his government confirm their determination to continue the offensive, whatever are the human and economic costs.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces has certainly declared that young people called up as part of the autumn conscription “will not be involved” in the areas of “special operation”. Similar promises have already been kept regularly from February 24, 2022 and the start of the offensive in Ukraine. But since then, families have said that their sons had been sent near the front. The spring conscription had already summoned 150,000 young men. And, on September 16, the Kremlin formalized a decree ordering an overall increase of nearly 15% in the number of soldiers, bringing it to 1.5 million from the current 1.32 million. One in fifty assets in Russia will therefore be in the army which, according to Russian media, would become the second largest in the world after that of China. The Kremlin faces an increasingly pressing challenge: with the expansion of the conflict, now extending from Crimea to the Kursk region, more men will be needed at the front but also at the rear. The young conscripts could therefore be required to carry out remote missions previously entrusted to their elders now sent to Ukraine.
All this has a cost. It keeps growing. The 2025 budget, which, in another carefully staged timing coincidence, was unveiled on the second anniversary of the claimed annexation of four Ukrainian regions, must now be voted on by Parliament and then signed by the president. A formality without debate or suspense in a parliamentary system under orders from the Kremlin. The figures announced will therefore almost be the final figures: defense spending will reach nearly 13,500 billion rubles in 2025 (130 billion euros at the current rate).
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Source: Lemonde
