Russia plans to begin cutting its "defense" spending in the near future. Currently, the Kremlin spends roughly 13.5 trillion rubles (almost $172 billion) annually on "defense," including the war in Ukraine,

President Putin said on Friday that Russia was looking to cut its military expenditure from next year, contrasting that with NATO's plan to ramp up defence spending over the next decade.

Russia has mocked Nato’s jump in defence spending, branding it ‘political masochism’. As foreign minister Sergey Lavrov put it, the 5% rise – which Donald Trump hailed a ‘big win for Europe and… Western civilisation’ – is the ‘talk of the town’.