President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has come at huge economic costs. By conservative estimates, the Russian economy has taken a US$67 billion annual hit as a result of war expenses and the effects of economic sanctions. In the early stages of the invasion, some analysts put the costs even higher, at $900 million per day.
These war costs show no sign of abating. The newly released Russian government budget for 2024 calls for a 70% defense expenditure increase, an astonishing reallocation of precious resources for a war that some observers expected to last a week at most.
