CHISINAU, September 3 (RIA Novosti) – Russia will spend $650 billion for the rearmament and modernization of its armed forces up to 2020, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said Tuesday.
Those funds will be spent only on the procurement of arms and military equipment, he said, adding that another $100 billion would go toward the technical modernization of defense enterprises. He also said Russia’s missile- and aircraft-manufacturing industries would be moved to the country’s eastern regions.
His remarks appear to be a little bit out of sync with a budget-optimization report released by the Finance Ministry earlier that day, suggesting that by putting off certain defense expenditures until 2016, the federal budget could save between 250 billion rubles ($7.4 billion) and 1.155 trillion rubles ($34.5 billion) within the next three years.
In June, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said defense spending priorities should be shifted from arms procurement to personnel and infrastructure. A month later, a deputy finance minister said the idea was not to cut defense spending, but optimize it.
The Russian government has reportedly allocated 20 trillion rubles ($640 billion) for a comprehensive rearmament of the Armed Forces that will see the share of modern weaponry reach 30 percent by 2015, and surpass 70 percent by 2020.
