In the last two parts of this special series, we investigated the data behind every confirmed civilian death in Ukraine since the war started, and where most Ukrainian refugees have fled to.  

Today’s visualization focuses on how much both countries have invested in their military in the last 15 years. 

The data used comes directly from the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database. 

It tracked annual defense spending from 2011 to 2025 in billions of US dollars at current prices.

TL;DR

• Russia outspent Ukraine 20 to 1 in 2016 ($69.27 billion vs $3.42 billion); by 2023, that gap had closed up to 1.67 to 1 ($109.2 billion vs $65.3 billion)
• Russia has nearly tripled its military budget since the 2021 pre-invasion level of $65.92 billion to $190.42 billion in 2025
• Ukraine has grown its budget 12-fold from $6.84 billion in 2021 to $84.11 billion in 2025

ICYMI: The Recap

We started a five-part series of data investigation to capture the effect of the Russia-Ukraine war in numbers.

• Ukraine War in Data Part 1 confirmed approximately 19,225 civilian deaths in Ukraine. 
• Ukraine War in Data Part 2 documented 5.35 million registered Ukrainian refugees and the countries hosting most of them across Europe and Asia. 
• Ukraine War in Data Part 3 mapped a military spending gap between Russia and Ukraine that closed from 20-to-1 to 2-to-1 before widening again.
• Ukraine War in Data Part 4 tracked €415 billion in international aid commitments from 23 donors into Ukraine.
• Ukraine War in Data Part 5, the final installment, documents what four years of the war physically did to Ukraine at its center. (Coming Soon)

Russia’s Decade of Cuts, Then the Surge

Russia’s military spending did not rise steadily leading up to the 2022 invasion. It fell first. 

The SIPRI data shows Russia at $88.35 billion in 2013, declining to $61.65 billion by 2018 (a 30% reduction over five years). 

The country that launched the largest land war in Europe since World War II spent a decade quietly cutting its defense budget before it did so.

The full-scale invasion reversed that entirely. 

From $65.92 billion in 2021, Russia’s spending jumped to $104.4 billion in 2022, then $109.2 billion in 2023, $149.4 billion in 2024, and $190.42 billion in 2025.

That is a 189% increase in four years. 

Russia is now spending approximately 6.6% of its GDP on defense, a level economists associate with wartime economies, where military spending displaces civilian investment in healthcare, education, and infrastructure in the national budget.

Ukraine’s Transformation

Ukraine spent $3.42 billion on its military in 2016. 

By 2025, it was spending $84.11 billion, a 24.6-fold increase in nine years. 

No country in SIPRI’s modern dataset has achieved a comparable military spending transformation without a regime change or oil windfall.

The sharpest single-year jump was from 2021 to 2022. It went from $6.84 billion to $41.54 billion (a 507% increase in one year).

Russia’s equivalent increase in the same period was 58%. 

The invaded country ramped up its military spending to nearly ten times that of the invading one, in proportional terms.

By 2025, Ukraine’s $84.11 billion military budget almost exactly matches Russia’s military budget in 2014 — $84.7 billion — the year Russia annexed Crimea and outgunned Ukraine 21 to 1. 

Ukraine today spends what Russia spent when it first began the sequence of events documented in Part 1 of this series. 

The Closest the Gap Has Ever Been

2023 is the dataset’s most significant year. Russia: $109.2 billion. Ukraine: $65.3 billion. A ratio of 1.67 to 1. 

Russia was spending less than twice as much as Ukraine, the narrowest margin in 15 years of SIPRI data.

The convergence was produced by two simultaneous forces: 

1. Russia’s spending increase was constrained by sanctions-affected procurement costs and supply chain disruptions
2. Ukraine’s spending was turbocharged by the international aid commitments documented in Part 4 of this series. 

Ukraine cannot spend money it does not receive.

The 1.67-to-1 ratio for 2023 is the ratio of Ukrainian domestic spending plus international support to Russian domestic spending. 

The Re-Widening

Since 2023, the ratio has moved back against Ukraine. 

Russia’s budget grew from $109.2 billion in 2023 to $190.42 billion in 2025, a 74% increase in two years. 

Ukraine’s military expenditure grew from $65.3 billion to $84.11 billion,  a 29% increase. 

Russia is accelerating faster in absolute terms. By 2025, the ratio stands at 2.26 to 1, wider than the 2023 low and continuing to widen.

Part 5 of this series will show what all of that spending, on both sides, has physically done to Ukraine.

ELI5 (Explain It Like I’m 5)

Before the big invasion, Russia was spending 20 times more on its military than Ukraine. Since the war started in 2022, Ukraine has massively increased its military budget from about $7 billion to $84 billion, while Russia went from $66 billion to $190 billion. The gap between them has shrunk from 20-to-1 to about 2-to-1, but Russia is now spending more every year and pulling ahead again. Part 3 of 5 in a data series on the war.

Source: 

SIPRI Military Expenditure Database