On Dec. 4, the official Twitter account of the Russian Embassy in Canada tweeted:
There are glaring problems in this tweet, starting with the assertion that Russia’s defense budget is $46 billion. That is , but misleading.
The figure is “basically the baseline defense budget at the current exchange rate,” Mark Galeotti, a Senior Fellow at the Prague Institute of International Relations and an expert on Russian security issues, told Polygraph.info.” It's not technically wrong but firstly understates the bang for buck, or rumble for ruble, the Russians get as they are also buying in rubles, not dollars. Also, there is about a trillion rubles in additional defense-related expenditure not in the defense budget.”
According to estimates by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Russia’s military spending totaled . (Although one expert -- Michael Kofman, Director of the Russia Studies Program at CNA Corporation, has estimated the real annual spending at roughly in terms of Purchasing Power Parity) By comparison, that its members budgeted a total of $1.04 trillion this year for defense. The obvious reason for this disparity is that Russia is a just a single country and NATO consists of 29 states, including some of the world’s leading military powers. Two NATO members, the United States and France, are in the top five global military spenders. They account for $752 billion and $51 billion, respectively, in NATO member spending.
The embassy tweet also implied that a “fake Russian threat” has been manufactured to justify such high defense spending.
This ignores the fact that NATO has conducted military operations outside Eastern Europe, (the International Security Assistance Force, 2003-2014, followed by the Resolute Support Mission, 2015). All 29 NATO countries have contributed to against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Regarding actual Russian aggression, there is the 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine, after which Russian forces invaded Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, parts of which remain under Russian occupation. Putin justified both actions in part by saying Moscow was “protecting Russian-speakers.” In 2008 Russia went to over of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Several NATO member countries – the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – border Russia and have significant Russian-speaking populations.
While the Baltic states have not yet faced a conventional military attack from Russia, they have been routinely targeted with . Estonia has been the target of coordinated believed to have been from . In 2014, an Estonian security operative, Eston Kohver, was several kilometers inside Estonian territory.
The Russian embassy tweet includes a cartoon about wealth inequality, implying that NATO defense spending is responsible for this problem in NATO member-states. Wealth inequality is a global problem; in fact the U.S. and Russia according to the World Inequality Database. A study by Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, in cooperation with VTB Bank, found that the in 2018. Russia has fared worse than others in , according to from the charity organization Oxfam.