Rosstat Figures Show Russia has Spent Five Trillion Rubles on Ukrainian War over Last 14 Months, Aleksashenko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 6 – The Putin regime pursues two contradictory goals in its reporting about what is going on in the economy. On the one hand, it wants to put out figures that show the economy is growing under its wise stewardship. But on the other, the Kremlin wants to hide spending that it can’t take pride in and that places ever greater burdens on the country.

            In the latter category, economist Sergey Aleksashenko says, is spending on the war in Ukraine. But here is the problem: the categories Moscow uses to report economic statistics allow one to draw conclusions about military spending that the regime itself certainly does not want anyone to do (hronika.substack.com/p/d4f).

            If one examines the statistics Rosstat offers and doesn’t engage in self-defeating assumptions about the sudden production of things that clearly aren’t being produced, then it is obvious that “over the last 14 months, Russia has spent at least five trillion rubles (70 billion US dollars) on the war in Ukraine.”

            That amounts to 34,500 rubles for every resident of the Russian Federation, some 55 percent of the average monthly salary there. There is no way for Moscow to hide all this if it publishes any statistics at all or hide in fact the most important consequence of this spending: it isn’t creating the basis for future growth but destroying the possibility of it.