Armenia intends to significantly increase military spendingArmenia will increase its defense budget by 50 percent in 2023, Eurasianet writes.
The funds will be spent on combat vehicles, equipment, communication systems, possible internal purchases of weapons and ammunition.
Ani MajlumyanAgainst the background of ongoing military pressure from Azerbaijan, Armenia announced that it would increase defense allocations by almost 50 percent.
According to the draft budget presented by the government at the Cabinet meeting on September 29, military expenditures will amount to 501 billion drams (more than $ 1.2 billion). This is 47 percent more than in 2022 in dram terms and even more in terms of dollars, because over the past few months, the exchange rate of the Armenian currency has sharply strengthened.
The bill does not specify what the additional funds will be used for, but it says that the budget will be spent on priorities, including "combat vehicles, equipment, communication systems, possible internal purchases of weapons and ammunition."
The Armenian government is under enormous public pressure to significantly strengthen the armed forces and rearm the country after the defeat of Azerbaijan in the 2020 war. Since then, Yerevan has been steadily increasing defense spending, which increased from $669 million in 2020 to $678 million in 2021 and $754 million in 2022. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan announced that it plans to increase its military spending to $2.8 billion by 2025, compared with $2.2 billion in 2020 and $2.6 billion in 2022.
The situation with military procurement in Armenia worsened after Russia launched a special operation in Ukraine earlier this year. As a result, apparently, arms supplies from the Russian Federation, which actually had a monopoly on arms supplies to Armenia, were interrupted.
At a meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan mentioned the interruptions in the supply of weapons from the "allies", for which he blamed Azerbaijan.
"Wherever possible, they [Azerbaijan] are trying to prevent the supply of weapons and ammunition to Armenia," he said. "There are cases when payments worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been made, but the partner countries do not fulfill their obligations."
"Pashinyan says that Armenia is waiting for weapons, for which it has paid millions. The only ally when it comes to large purchases, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is Russia," he said Eurasianet.org Leonid Nersisyan, military analyst and researcher at the Yerevan Analytical Center "Institute of Applied Political Studies of Armenia". "As a result, we lost a year waiting for supplies from Russia."
Earlier this month, Azerbaijan launched unprecedented attacks on the territory of Armenia. As a result of two days of fierce fighting, Yerevan reported 207 soldiers killed or missing, as well as four civilians killed and two missing. Baku reported 80 soldiers killed. On September 28, Armenia reported that three more soldiers were killed as a result of Azerbaijani shelling. In addition, Azerbaijan is threatening further attacks, trying to gain diplomatic advantages in the ongoing negotiations on a peace agreement.
In terms of the ratio of military spending to GDP, Armenia was already one of the world leaders: according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2021 its defense budget was 4.4 percent of GDP, which put the country in ninth place in the world (Azerbaijan was in fifth place with 5.3 percent).
"This is a very large sum for armaments, Armenia has never approached it," Nersisyan said. – These figures should have been increasing since 2010; in 2015 they increased the budget, but not enough. If we had had such a budget since 2016, the war [in 2020] would probably have ended differently."
