SIPRI Insights on Peace and Security

The Russian government has been devoting an ever-increasing volume of resources to the war with Ukraine, while attempting to maintain normality for its citizens. Russia has maintained an almost balanced budget because the economy has been growing at a rapid pace, despite tough international sanctions. The challenge in preparing the budget for 2025–27 was to continue this balance as the economy showed signs of overheating and the Central Bank attempted to cool it, creating problems for businesses.

Despite diminished budget transparency, Russia’s total planned military expenditure in 2025 can be estimated at 15.5 trillion roubles, a real-terms increase of 3.4 per cent over 2024 and equivalent to 7.2 per cent of gross domestic product. This level of spending should be manageable, but budgetary pressures could mount.

A growing share of total military spending lies outside the budget chapter ‘National defence’, including spending on social support. This is rendering ‘National defence’ an ever more unreliable proxy for Russian military spending. In addition to military expenditure, the budget includes war-related spending on territory occupied in Ukraine and its own border regions.

This paper explores possibilities for building confidence in the Korean peninsula to address the conflict dynamics and militarization in the region.

The rapid advancement of military artificial intelligence (AI), especially its potential integration into nuclear systems, presents significant risks to strategic stability and established deterrence practices. Despite these concerns, no dedicated governance framework currently exists to address the specific challenges of the AI–nuclear nexus. Existing initiatives have primarily focused on ensuring human control over nuclear decision-making.

There are a number of state-led initiatives on the governance of military AI more broadly. They can be adapted to address the use of AI in nuclear weapons, but applying them will not be straightforward. There is thus a need to extend the conversation beyond the ‘human in the loop’ concept and develop targeted governance measures. Future discussions could investigate the precise level and degree of required human control and set clear red lines for both the extent and the type of AI integration in nuclear and related systems.

This SIPRI Insights Paper examines how climate change interacts with existing vulnerabilities in North Kivu and South Kivu in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo to heighten human insecurity and conflict risks.

This SIPRI Insights on Peace and Security paper explores both the opportunities and processes for reforming aid provision in fragile settings. The paper advocates for an integrated peacebuilding approach that tackles multiple complex issues together in a collaborative, long-term and interlinked manner. It outlines necessary changes at the political, donor and organizational levels to make this approach a reality.

This SIPRI Insights addresses challenges related to climate finance distribution in conflict-affected countries, where vulnerabilities to climate change are significantly exacerbated. The paper’s analysis, covering both bilateral and multilateral ODA flows between 2015 and 2021, highlights significant disparities in per capita climate adaptation funding.

This SIPRI Insights on Peace and Security explores both opportunities for and limitations of climate change adaptation in areas beyond government control.

This paper examines the role of nuclear weapons in military alliances, focusing on the perspectives of the so-called umbrella states—that is, allied states that do not have their own nuclear weapons but are part of the ‘extended nuclear deterrence arrangements’ of a nuclear-armed patron. After analysing allied security thinking and highlighting the underlying assumptions about nuclear deterrence, the paper subjects some of those assumptions to critical scrutiny.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has been waged for over 650 days and has had a significant impact on the country’s economy and society.

Cyber incidents that—whether due to human error, system malfunction or intentional targeting—impact satellite and missile systems extend beyond the ongoing war in Ukraine. These systems are essential to civilian and military operations and disrupting them has the potential to elicit conventional or even nuclear retaliation. Due to the centrality of satellite and missile-related infrastructure, cyber incidents impacting the functionality of such infrastructure have served as a catalyst for previous confidence-building measures (CBMs) that may provide a template for future ones.