Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov accused European Union countries of posing a military threat to Russia on May 14, 2025, during the "In The Know" program on the BelTA news agency’s YouTube channel.
“They’ve planned—by ‘they’ I mean Western leaders—to allocate a trillion euros in 2025 to rearm European armies. A trillion! That’s 15 times bigger than Russia’s defense budget. So the real question is: Who’s threatening whom? Is it Russia with its €70 billion budget, or is it you with your trillion-euro budget?” the former prime minister asked.
According to official figures from Russia’s Ministry of Finance, the federal defense budget for 2025 is actually twice the amount cited—13.5 trillion rubles, or about €150 billion. That’s roughly 6.5% of Russia’s GDP.
Across all EU countries combined, last year’s military budget didn’t even reach 2% of the bloc’s total GDP and totaled just over €320 billion. In 2025, the EU began discussing a possible increase in defense spending, but not anywhere near €1 trillion. The European Union is planning to add another €800 billion to its current spending, but that’s over four years—not a single year—so the target year is 2030. Even then, the increase would bring the EU’s defense spending up to only 3.5% of its projected GDP, compared to Russia’s current rate of more than 6%.