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But Russia has nukes and a sizable military. How can they afford to have such a large military, if their gdp is like Spain's? Russia population is around 144 m

But Russia has nukes and a sizable military. How can they afford to have such a large military, if their gdp is like Spain's? Russia population is around 144 million, Spain's around 46 million according to google, so about 3x the population, but 1/3 gdp per person. Are the poor so starved in russia that they can afford to have jet fighter development, nukes, air craft carriers, etc? I'd never thought hard about how Russia can afford to have such an apparently dangerous military while being relatively small and poor.

NinjaKitten 9y ago
They can't really "afford it" in the common sense of it. Russia is just so big and has so much left over hardware and factories from soviet days as well as people with the know how that things will get done alone almost automatically by scale and diversity of options. Somewhere there's always someone able that's willing to do it for less. Its difficult to explain this concept/phenomenon, but Russia just works very differently compared to other countries and has a lot of underpaid skilled people, information and older tech to fallback on.