By AFP and Kontur | 2026-02-06

Russia has been spending far more on its military than it has reported, Germany's foreign intelligence agency said February 4 as it warned of Moscow's threat to NATO's eastern border.

The BND said that its analysis of Russian budget data showed that in 2022 and 2023, military spending had been around 66% higher than officially reported.

"These figures are a concrete embodiment of the growing threat to Europe posed by Russia," the agency said in a rare public statement.

It said Russia's definition of defense spending differed from that used by NATO and excluded expenses such as military construction and IT projects or welfare payments to service members' families.

If these and other "hidden" amounts are taken into account, total spending in 2024 reached €202 billion ($171 billion) instead of the official €140 billion, it said.

For the first three quarters of 2025, the total jumps to €163 billion, as opposed to the officially reported €118 billion, according to the BND.

In the years running up to Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the "hidden" parts of the Russian military budget were almost as big as those which were officially declared.

The BND said that, taken together, military spending in 2025 represented around 10% of Russia's economic output and half of its total budget.

"These funds are not only being used for the war against Ukraine, but also for the additional build-up and expansion of military capabilities -- particularly near NATO's eastern flank," the BND said.

In October BND chief Martin Jaeger told lawmakers that Russia was determined to expand its "sphere of influence further westward into Europe."

"To achieve this goal, Russia will not shy away from direct military confrontation with NATO if necessary," Jaeger warned.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has accused Russia of sabotage, cyberattacks and espionage targeting Germany and other European countries.

Critical infrastructure protections

Those warnings have been accompanied by a shift in focus at home, as Berlin moves to treat critical infrastructure as a central front in national security.

In January, the country's parliament voted for legislation requiring power utilities, water companies and even some supermarket chains to reduce their vulnerability to terrorism, industrial accidents, natural disasters and public health emergencies.

"Germany is not at war, but we are the target of hybrid warfare -- sabotage, espionage, aggression by foreign powers, terrorism," Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told fellow lawmakers ahead of the vote.

"We have a responsibility to ensure that we implement resilience measures."

The package, which aims to bring Germany in line with European Union directives, would oblige some 1,700 essential services providers to step up physical security and alarm systems, carry out regular risk assessments and promptly report incidents.

The measures cover facilities that provide critical services to at least 500,000 people in sectors including energy, water, food, health, transport, IT, telecommunications, financial services and waste disposal.

A wake-up call came weeks ago in Berlin when a mid-winter arson attack on a high-voltage power cable claimed by a far-left militant group plunged tens of thousands of households into icy darkness for nearly a week.

The attack, which sparked public fury amid a slow response, has led the government to offer a one-million-euro ($1.1 million) reward for tips leading to arrests of the culprits, who called themselves the "Vulkangruppe" (Vulcan Group).

Information about such infrastructure should no longer be so easily available to the public, Dobrindt said, calling for a shift from "transparency towards greater resilience."

Many security experts have welcomed the new critical infrastructure bill in principle, but others have harshly criticized it as too little too late.

'As important as tanks and drones'

The Berlin blackout illustrated the cascading effects of infrastructure outages, as mobile networks, district heating and even local train services all went down.

Daniel Hiller, who works on security and resilience at the Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics, said modern systems are "so large, so complex and so interdependent" that it's essentially impossible to fully secure them against all threats, making planning for contingencies and back-up alternatives an important part of civil defense.

"Anyone who claims that 100 percent protection is possible is pulling the wool over people's eyes."

Sabrina Schulz, Germany director at the European Initiative for Energy Security think tank, agreed that "you can't prevent everything -- so it's more about redundancy than fortifying existing infrastructure."

Merz has now vowed to turn Germany's army into Europe's largest conventional force, but Schulz said building infrastructure resilience is "at least as important as tanks and drones, if not more so."