Ukraine War Helped Push World Military Spending to 35-Year High, Study Says

The outlay reached $2.4 trillion last year, a research group found, 6.8 percent up on 2022. Tensions in Asia and the Middle East also contributed.

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Ukrainian soldiers with a howitzer in the country’s Donetsk region in February.

The world spent more on military costs and weapons in 2023 than it had in 35 years, driven in part by the war in Ukraine and the threat of an expanded Russian invasion, according to an independent analysis released on Monday.

The study, by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, concluded that global military spending reached $2.4 trillion last year — a 6.8 percent increase from 2022. Growing tensions in Asia and across the Middle East also contributed to the rise, analysts found, while the United States alone spent $916 billion — more than one-third of the total — as the world’s largest military spender and weapons supplier.

“The unprecedented rise in military spending is a direct response to the global deterioration in peace and security,” said Nan Tian, a senior researcher at the institute, which has tracked military expenditures since at least 1988.

He described an “increasingly volatile geopolitical and security landscape.”

Ukraine, in its first full year of war with Russia, devoted $64.8 billion to its military in 2023. That accounted for 58 percent of the government’s overall spending last year and 37 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Only seven other countries spent more on military and defense costs than Ukraine in 2023, analysts found.

One was Russia, which Mr. Tian estimated spent $109 billion last year — more than any other country except the United States and China. That projection was based on the $75 billion that Moscow announced last September it had already spent for 2023, Mr. Tian said, who added that Russia’s military spending could rise to $127 billion this year, depending on the value of the ruble.

Either way, and despite the secrecy and disinformation surrounding Moscow’s defense investments, the institute concluded that Russia had spent about 16 percent of its total government spending, or 5.9 percent of its gross domestic product, on its military in 2023 — the highest since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991.

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