Europe’s stated intent to ramp up military spending will run into the constraint caused by the continent’s relative economic decline. The UK has recently announced, with fanfare, a defence budget hike that would take its share of defence expenditure in GDP to 2.5 percent. But the actual increase is just 0.2 percentage point since the UK was already spending 2.3 percent of its GDP on defence. Russia, on the other hand, can afford to sustain the present defence budget very easily for near future. Its defence budget was $64.8 billion in 2023, almost one-half of Russia’s $109 billion. The IISS Military balance actually puts it as $28.4 billion for Ukraine vis-à-vis $145 billion for Russia (on PPP basis) in 2024. The European Commission declared on 4th March that it would raise around 150 billion euros as part of its collective rearmament efforts. However, the periodicity over which this amount would be mobilised along with proportion meant for Ukraine are unclear.