Military spending in Europe surpassed its end-Cold War level in 2022, the biggest increase in more than three decades, boosted mainly by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to a benchmark report released today. .

Across all continents combined, military spending reached a new peak in 2022, reaching $2.24 trillion, or in other words 2.2% of global GDP, according to data revealed by the International Peace Research Institute of Stockholm (SIPRI).

“They increased because of the war in Ukraine, which pushed up European budgets, as well as unresolved and growing tensions in East Asia” between China on the one hand and the US and its Asian allies on the other, he explained. Nan Tian, ​​one of the authors of the report, told AFP.

The old continent spent, after adjusting for inflation, 13% more on military spending in 2022.

This is the largest increase in more than 30 years and a return – in deflated dollars – to the level of spending in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down.

This is a level “we haven’t seen since the end of the cold war”, Mr Tian said.

Ukraine itself increased its military spending sevenfold, jumping to $44 billion, in other words a third of its GDP. And that’s without counting billions of dollars in arms donations from abroad, SIPRI points out.

Russian military spending rose by 9.2 percent, according to his calculations.

Military spending in Europe, which reached $480 billion in 2022, had already increased by more than a third in ten years, and the trend is expected to continue over the next decade.

After a large decline in the 1990s, global military spending began to rise again from the 2000s.

First because of China’s heavy investment in its military, then because of the resurgence of tensions with Russia following the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The US alone accounted for 39% of global military spending in 2022. Together with China, which ranked second (13%), it accounted for more than half of global military spending.