The Russian government will not cut financing for its rearmament program for the armed forces, President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday.
“This is one of the most serious tasks for the government,” Putin said. “The main, more or less most important thing is that the systems vital to our defense capabilities are worn out, we have to replace them. We can make small changes in timescale to the left or right, but that’s insignificant, so we won’t cut it [spending],” Putin said at a meeting on expanding the borders of Moscow.
The government has budgeted 20 trillion rubles ($641 billion) for a comprehensive rearmament of Russia’s Armed Forces which will see the share of modern weaponry reach 30 percent by 2015, and 70 percent by 2020.
Last week, First Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Sukhorukov also said Russia had no plans to cut defense spending.
“We do not have any plans to cut the program’s budget,” Sukhorukov said. “We will simply change the financing scheme.”