A draft 2006 budget allocates 668.3 billion rubles (24 billion dollars, 19.5 billion euros) for spending on national defense, an increase of nearly 22 percent on this year's defense budget and a figure equivalent to about 2.75 percent of Russia's projected gross national product.

The draft 2006 budget heralds a third consecutive year of significant increase in Russian defense spending in real terms, and came as President Vladimir Putin reiterated that upgrading the country's armed forces remained a priority of his presidency.

"I remember a time when ships stood idle in port, when planes did not fly. At the beginning of the 1990s, servicemen had their caps snatched off their heads when they rode on public transport," RIA-Novosti news agency quoted Putin as saying aboard a naval cruise in the Barents Sea on Wednesday.

"A lot has changed since then. ... Problems remain, but critical changes regarding the combat readiness of the armed forces have been made."

In the past two days, Putin has underscored the priority his administration attaches to rebuilding Russian defenses, breaking the sound barrier as he took the pilot's seat of a supersonic strategic bomber on Tuesday and attending strategic naval exercises on Wednesday.

The headline figure cited by Russian news agencies is dwarfed by basic US defense expenditure, which has been well in excess of 400 billion dollars for years and projected to rise by at least five percent in 2006 based on pending Pentagon budget requests.

The United States alone spends about as much on defense annually as all other countries of the world combined, according to independent international defense specialists.

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