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The Russian federal budget is characterized by a high degree of opacity in relation to spending on defence and security. Of the nuclear weapon states (i.e. China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States), Russia is less transparent than the USA and the UK, and more similar to France, for which there are also reporting and transparency issues when it comes to disclosing the costs of its nuclear arsenal. This applies in particular to the procurement of armaments and spending on the individual services of the armed forces. The funding of nuclear weapons is no exception. The available evidence is fragmentary and a considerable degree of estimation is required to obtain an overall total for spending on Russia's nuclear triad. For Russian specialists this is a highly sensitive topic and there do not seem to be any attempts to undertake this exercise within the country. Given the lack of transparency, 'Sovietological' methods often necessary in the past to estimate economic data relating to the Soviet Union are employed.
This topical backgrounder starts with an overview of Russia's large-scale nuclear modernization programme, which started after the adoption of its state armament programme for 2011-20. It then outlines Russia's nuclear institutions and how the expenditure is managed within Russia's federal budget. Finally, it provides an estimate of Russia spending on nuclear weapons between the years 2010 and 2016 based on the fragmentary evidence available. Due to the scarcity of data, 2010 and 2016 have been selected since these are the years with the most data available.
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