Most Defense Ministry budget expenditures are used for Armed Forces equipment - deputy minister
MOSCOW. Dec 29 (Interfax-AVN) - There are two big components in the budget of the Russian Defense Ministry: the expenditures on the upkeep of the Armed Forces and the expenditures on their equipment, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Tatyana Shevtsova told reporters on Friday.
"The former account for 40% of the budget and the latter account for 60%," she said.
"The expenditures on national defense are not equal to the expenditures on the upkeep of the army," she said. The expenditures on equipment were higher than the expenditures on the upkeep of the army in 2016 and in 2017, she said.
Speaking about 2018, Shevtsova said this tendency will remain. "One and a half trillion [rubles] is the cost of re-equipment and 1.3 trillion is the cost of the upkeep," she said.
The expenditures on equipment are "big investments in our defense sector, which have a multiplicated effect," she said.
Specifically, defense enterprises' tax payments in the section "expenditures on the equipment of the Armed Forces" have reached 481 billion rubles and the expenditures on wages have reached 444 billion rubles since 2015.