Russia can easily afford it, according to this well-known Russian economist
This post first appeared on Russia Insider
This is an excerpt from a transcript of an interview that appeared on Russian radio. The author is a well-known economist, a military and financial expert at the Moscow Higher School of Economics’ Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.
Translated by Vladimir Gavryushin
If we are going to talk about the biggest war in our post-Soviet history then we should speak about the Second Chechen Campaign. It was revealed during a State Duma session by deputies that, during the peak of military operations in December 1999, the cost was around 100 million rubles (around 5 million US dollars) per day.
This was the price for a really “big” war with tens of thousands of soldiers. Today we pay much less for our current involvement in Syria.
You can easily divide that figure from 1999 by multiple times. Right now we have 50 aircraft stationed on the airstrip at Latakia. Each hour of flight time costs several thousand dollars. The first round of air strikes included about 20 military sorties. Let’s multiply that number by 6-7 thousand dollars. This means that a day of military aircraft actions would hypothetically not, at most, cost more than 400 thousand dollars, excluding the cost of munitions.
There are also the salaries for our military personnel but that’s small money. I mean, it would have cost us a lot if we had a large unit, for example something like ten thousand infantrymen who needed paying. Instead of that we have aircraft, maintenance crews, engineering staff and security.
In any case, this figure when compared against the current Russian State budget is absolutely insignificant.
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