Sixteen EU members, including Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland and the Baltic states, want to bypass EU budget rules and allocate up to an extra 1.5% of GDP for military spending over the next four years. This would double the European Union’s defense budget by 2030, reaching €650 billion. National security expert Alexander Tishchenko said on the SB TV program “PRO Army” on May 2, 2025, that the EU has no room to raise military spending because poverty levels are too high.
“One in five people in the Baltics lives below the poverty line. Half the population lives at the subsistence level — meaning they can’t save, can’t go to the movies, can’t even grab coffee or go out to a restaurant. Right? They’re living paycheck to paycheck, just scraping by. That’s what this subsistence minimum really means. They’re not destitute, but they don’t see any future. The scariest part is that half of Poland’s population lives at the subsistence level. Fewer are technically below the poverty line — about one in 15 Poles. But 17 million people are living at the bare minimum. And Germany? Paradoxically, nearly half of Germans are also stuck at the subsistence level,” the expert said.
If his claims are true, every second Pole, German and resident of the Baltic states lives at the subsistence level, and up to 20% of people in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia live below the poverty line.
There are many ways to measure poverty. Tishchenko was most likely referring to the at-risk-of-poverty threshold. According to 2023 Eurostat data, about one in five people in the Baltic states fell below that threshold. In Germany and Poland, it was around 15% of the population. The figures are close to what Tishchenko claimed. But this metric doesn’t capture real hardship — it simply means someone earns less than 60% of the national median income after benefits. That can mean they have less money than most, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re living in poverty.
Belstat uses the relative poverty rate to assess the population’s standard of living. It is calculated using roughly the same method as the at-risk-of-poverty threshold. Eleven percent of Belarusians fall below this level. In other words, the situation is twice as good as in the Baltic states, but nearly the same as in Poland.
According to Tishchenko, every second Pole and German lives at the subsistence level. That figure does in fact apply to about 17 million Poles — nearly half the country’s population. In Poland, however, the subsistence level — or “zone of deprivation” — is not considered the poverty line. In 2024, it was set at €430 per person per month. According to local economists, that’s enough to meet all basic needs, including food, clothing, education and leisure.
In Germany, people’s standard of living is measured differently. Households are categorized by income level: poor, unstable income, three tiers of middle class, and wealthy. Anyone falling short of the middle-class threshold earns less than 80% of the country’s median per-person income. That group includes less than a third of the population — not half, as Alexander Tishchenko claimed.
Belarus doesn’t use this kind of income classification. But the WTF team used the German method to estimate how many Belarusians were living on less than 80% of the country’s median per capita disposable income at the end of last year. The median stood at 1,000 rubles per person. So the number we’re looking at is 800 rubles a month. According to Belstat, nearly 29% of Belarusians earned that amount or less in 2024 — almost the same as in Germany.