Russia’s rapidly expanding war spending is driving a sharp rise in secret federal budget expenditures, with nearly one-third of all state spending now hidden from public view, according to estimates by the Gaidar Institute.
The share of classified spending in Russia’s federal budget rose to 28.6% in 2025 from 24.9% in 2024 and nearly doubled from 15.1% in 2021, the last full year before Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine, the institute said in a budget review.
Russia has not published detailed federal budget expenditure data since 2022, forcing analysts to reconstruct spending patterns using partial information from multiple sources.
The Gaidar Institute cautioned that its calculations were based on “fragmentary information available from different sources” because budget expenditure data has not been fully disclosed since the start of the war.
Based on the institute’s estimates, classified spending reached 12.3 trillion rubles ($172.2 billion) out of total federal expenditures of 42.9 trillion rubles ($600.6 billion) in 2025.
