THE FINANCIAL HISTORY OF THE CAMPAIGNS OF THE CURRENT HYBRID WAR

 

THE WORLD NEWSREEL

HW1 — THE FIRST HYBRID WAR

THE FINANCIAL HISTORY OF THE CAMPAIGNS

The Military Expenditure Ledger, 2022–2026

Historical Atlas of HW1 — Economic and Strategic Supplement

AN ANALYSIS FROM: THE CRITICAL LEGAL ENUIRY - CARDOZO INSTITUTE

The First Hybrid War was fought not only by armies, aircraft and warships, but also through government budgets, industrial production, international credit and the mobilisation of national economies.

Its financial history reveals an important distinction: the money spent maintaining military power was considerably greater than the money directly attributable to individual campaigns.

For this reason, the following account separates total military expenditure, campaign-related assistance and sovereign indebtedness.

I. The Military Expenditure Ledger

The latest internationally comparable annual figures cover the period through December 2025. Expenditure during 2026 remains provisional and is therefore excluded from the consolidated totals.

All amounts are expressed in billions of US dollars.

Power or alliance	2025 expenditure	Consolidated historical figure
NATO — all members	$1,581 bn	$5,660 bn, 2022–2025
United States	$954 bn	$3,744 bn, approximate 2022–2025 total
Russia	$190 bn	$448 bn, 2023–2025; 2022 excluded
European NATO members	$559 bn	Separate cumulative total not established
European Union	—	Separate EU-27 series required
Israel	$48.3 bn	Four-year total not established
Iran	$7.4 bn	Four-year total not established
Ukraine	$84.1 bn	Four-year total not established

The NATO total is the sum of reported annual alliance expenditure: $1,232 billion in 2022, $1,341 billion in 2023, $1,506 billion in 2024 and $1,581 billion in 2025.

These annual totals reflect changes in NATO membership, including Finland's accession in 2023 and Sweden's in 2024.

The American figure is an approximate sum of annual spending, while Russia's three-year figure deliberately excludes 2022 rather than introducing an insufficiently reconciled estimate.

These are historical expenditure totals, not estimates of the direct cost of HW1. The 2022 totals also include January and most of February, before the opening of the Eastern Campaign.

II. The Balance of Military Expenditure

In 2025, NATO members collectively spent approximately 8.3 times as much on their armed forces as Russia.

The United States alone spent approximately five times as much.

Yet military expenditure cannot be translated mechanically into battlefield superiority.

Personnel costs, procurement prices, exchange rates, industrial structures, geographical commitments and purchasing power differ substantially between countries.

Furthermore, American military expenditure supports global operations, including commitments outside the European and Middle Eastern theatres.

The financial imbalance therefore describes the scale of available military resources, not the outcome of any particular campaign.

III. The Eastern Campaign: The Cost of Supporting Ukraine

Military assistance to Ukraine constitutes one of the most identifiable financial components of HW1.

The European Union, its member states and the United States have supplied weapons, ammunition, training, financial assistance and support for the Ukrainian state.

Two distinct accounting methods must be preserved.

The first records military assistance allocated to Ukraine.

The second records national government appropriations, including procurement, replacement of donated equipment, military operations and other related expenditure.

These figures cannot simply be added together.

For the United States, supplemental appropriations to the Department of Defense for Ukraine-related support reached approximately $127 billion during 2022–2025.

Of this amount, approximately $65.1 billion had been disbursed by the end of 2025.

The difference between appropriation and disbursement is essential: money authorised by a legislature is not necessarily money already spent.

European assistance must likewise be distinguished between commitments, allocations and actual disbursements.

IV. The Ukrainian Sovereign Debt

Ukraine's state and state-guaranteed debt, 31 August 2026: $215.55 billion.

Component	USD billions
External public debt	164.80
Domestic public debt	44.97
State-guaranteed debt	5.79
Total	215.55

The figures are rounded.

External public debt represented approximately 76.5% of the total.

A substantial proportion of Ukraine's obligations consisted of concessional financing, carrying terms more favourable than ordinary commercial borrowing.

The debt total must not be mistaken for the cost of the war.

It includes obligations incurred before February 2022, as well as financing associated with wartime expenditure and the continued operation of the Ukrainian state.

Nor should military grants be counted as additions to sovereign debt.

A grant transfers resources without creating a repayment obligation. A loan creates a liability, although its economic burden depends upon interest rates, maturity, grace periods and possible restructuring.

V. The Persian and Levantine Campaigns

The financial history of the Persian and Levantine theatres requires a different accounting approach.

Israel's national military expenditure reached $48.3 billion in 2025, while Iran's estimated expenditure was $7.4 billion.

These figures describe annual military spending, not the cumulative operational costs of the campaigns.

An adequate campaign account would separately identify expenditure on aircraft operations, precision-guided weapons, missile launches, air defence, mobilisation, equipment replacement and the protection of maritime communications.

It would also distinguish expenditure by Israel and Iran from the costs incurred by American forces operating in the region.

The published national military budgets cannot, by themselves, supply this operational account.

VI. The European Rearmament

The financial consequences of HW1 extended beyond direct military assistance.

Germany expanded defence expenditure and forward deployments.

Poland accelerated procurement and the expansion of its armed forces.

France maintained overseas and European commitments while increasing defence investment.

Italy strengthened its participation in NATO's eastern deployments and expanded military spending.

Finland and Sweden entered NATO, changing the military geography of northern Europe.

The enlargement of the Alliance and the reinforcement of its eastern flank involved expenditure on equipment, infrastructure, readiness, logistics and military exercises.

Such expenditure belongs to the wider strategic history of HW1, even where the forces concerned did not participate in combat.

VII. The Problem of Double Counting

A financial history of HW1 must avoid three common errors.

First, NATO expenditure cannot be added to American expenditure, because the American total is already included in NATO's accounts.

Second, European Union expenditure cannot be added indiscriminately to NATO expenditure, because most EU member states also belong to NATO.

Third, military assistance supplied by one state and received by another must not automatically be counted twice as an additional resource consumed by the international system.

The appropriate method is to maintain separate accounts for military spending, international transfers, direct campaign costs and public debt.

Only after these categories have been reconciled can a meaningful consolidated estimate be attempted.

VIII. The Historical Balance Sheet

The financial record already establishes the enormous scale of military mobilisation.

Between 2022 and 2025, the annual expenditure totals of NATO members amounted to approximately $5.66 trillion.

In 2025 alone, the United States spent $954 billion, Russia approximately $190 billion, Israel $48.3 billion and Iran an estimated $7.4 billion.

By August 2026, Ukraine's public and state-guaranteed debt had reached $215.55 billion.

But none of these figures, individually or collectively, measures the total economic cost of HW1.

That larger account would require estimates of destroyed infrastructure, lost production, displaced populations, disrupted trade, reconstruction liabilities and the long-term costs of military mobilisation.

The historical significance of the expenditure ledger lies precisely in this distinction.

The cost of maintaining the armed forces, the cost of conducting the campaigns and the economic cost of the international confrontation are three different quantities.

A serious history of HW1 must calculate all three.

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The World Newsreel — Historical Atlas of HW1

Financial record compiled from SIPRI military expenditure series and official Ukrainian debt statistics. Annual military spending is distinguished from campaign expenditure, assistance commitments and sovereign liabilities.

Know today the truths of tomorrow.

The principal statistical references are SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, SIPRI 2025 expenditure report and the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance debt statement. 

SIPRI

+4

The $5.66 trillion NATO total is calculated, but the remaining four-year national totals should not be presented as final until the 2022–2025 figures have been reconciled against one consistent SIPRI database vintage. The same applies to the EU-27 total. This is a substantive limitation of the current ledger, rather than a zero-expenditure entry.

 SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2026 · MORNING EDITION

THE WORLD NEWSREEL

THE WORLD NEWSREEL
Evening Edition — October 20, 2026

                                                    OUR COMMENT / WORLD AFFAIRS

SUDAN — THE OTHER FAULT LINE

More than eighty dead in Kordofan as drone warfare spreads — and a forgotten civil war begins to reveal a much larger geopolitical fracture

The world has learned to watch the northern fault line. It has barely begun to notice the southern one.

KHARTOUM / KORDOFAN — Sudan's war entered another deadly phase as drone attacks struck targets from the capital to the country's western and southern battle zones, killing scores of civilians and pushing a conflict already responsible for one of the world's gravest humanitarian emergencies still further into the age of remote warfare.

At al-Dibab, in West Kordofan, a drone struck a transport point near a market where villagers were waiting for rides home. At least 80 people were initially reported killed. Witnesses and medical personnel said civilians made up much of the toll. A further 47 wounded were taken to al-Mujlad; according to medical sources cited by AFP, 30 later died of their injuries.

Sudanese groups aligned against the army accused the Sudanese Armed Forces — SAF — of carrying out the strike. That attribution has not been independently established.

In Khartoum, meanwhile, a drone attack attributed to the opposing Rapid Support Forces — RSF — killed three children, aged two, four and six. Other attacks have struck Nyala in South Darfur and targets in Blue Nile, while drones launched by the RSF have increasingly reached government-held towns and infrastructure far beyond the older front lines.

Then came Abyei.

On Monday a drone strike hit a market in the disputed territory between Sudan and South Sudan. South Sudanese officials now say more than 150 people may have been killed. The Sudanese military was blamed for the attack; officials said the apparent target was a fuel depot allegedly associated with RSF activity. Thousands were displaced by the ensuing fires. The allegation and the claimed RSF presence remain contested.

The numbers are becoming difficult even to absorb.

The United Nations says millions have been driven from their homes since fighting began in April 2023. UNICEF estimated in mid-2026 that around 15 million people had experienced displacement, while 19.5 million people were facing crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse. More than 825,000 children were threatened by severe acute malnutrition.

And yet Sudan remains, in much of the world, the war one hears about after the other wars.

That may be a mistake.

Because Sudan is not merely another civil war.

It lies directly across one of the emerging fault lines of the twenty-first century.

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NEWSREEL COMMENT

THE OTHER FAULT LINE

Look at the world map differently tonight.

Do not begin in Ukraine.

Begin on the Atlantic edge of the Sahara.

Move east.

Across the Sahel.

Mauritania.

Mali.

Burkina Faso.

Niger.

Chad.

Then Sudan.

Continue toward the Red Sea.

Across it lies Yemen.

Beyond Yemen lie Saudi Arabia, Oman and eventually the Persian Gulf.

It forms no formal alliance.

It has no treaty.

There is no line on any diplomatic map identifying it.

But increasingly it behaves like a geopolitical fracture zone.

One great strategic fault line of our time can already be traced from the Baltic through Ukraine and the Black Sea toward the Middle East and the Gulf.

There is another.

It begins close to the Atlantic and runs eastward across the Sahara and Sahel until it meets the Red Sea.

Sudan sits almost exactly at its hinge.

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HOW THE WAR BEGAN

The immediate explanation of Sudan's war is deceptively simple.

There are two generals.

General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan commands the regular Sudanese Armed Forces.

General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — Hemedti — commands the Rapid Support Forces.

They were not originally enemies.

They were partners.

Both belonged to the military-security system that survived the fall of Omar al-Bashir. In 2019 they participated in the political order that followed Bashir's overthrow. In October 2021 their forces cooperated in ending Sudan's attempted transition toward civilian government.

Then came the question every revolutionary coalition eventually discovers:

Who commands whom?

The proposed return to civilian rule required the RSF eventually to be incorporated into the regular armed forces.

But incorporation raised the question of timetable.

And timetable raised the question of command.

And command raised the question of power.

Burhan possessed an army.

Hemedti possessed another army.

In April 2023 the constitutional problem became artillery fire in the streets of Khartoum.

But even that description is incomplete.

For the RSF was not simply another military unit.

Its genealogy leads backward into the militias of Darfur — the Janjaweed formations mobilised by the Bashir regime during the wars of the early 2000s. Over time that militia system acquired a formal organisation, international connections, gold revenues, commercial interests and military experience extending beyond Sudan, including participation in the Yemen war.

Thus, when Sudan collapsed into war, it did not divide neatly into government and rebels.

It divided between two competing centres of armed sovereignty.

That distinction matters.

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THE MAP BENEATH THE WAR

Now look at Kordofan.

It lies between the army's principal territories to the east and the RSF's western strongholds in Darfur.

That makes Kordofan not peripheral but central.

Whoever controls it possesses the bridge between western Sudan and the Nile system.

That is why places such as El Obeid, Bara, Dilling, Kadugli and West Kordofan appear repeatedly in dispatches.

Darfur is the RSF's strategic depth.

Khartoum and the eastern state apparatus form the SAF's political and institutional depth.

Kordofan is the hinge between them.

But widen the map once again.

To Sudan's west lie Chad and Libya.

To its north, Egypt.

To its east, the Red Sea.

Across that water lie Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.

To the southeast lie Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.

Sudan is therefore simultaneously:

an African state,

a Sahelian state,

a Nile state,

a Red Sea state,

an Arab-world state,

and a gateway to the Horn.

Few countries sit at the intersection of so many strategic systems.

That is why everybody has an interest in Sudan.

And why almost nobody possesses enough power to end its war.

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TWO PLATES

The geological metaphor must not be pushed too literally.

There are no two tidy alliances sliding apart like Africa and South America.

But there are two political environments separating from one another.

On one side is an increasingly fragile interior Sahelian belt.

It runs from Mali and Burkina Faso through Niger and Chad toward Darfur and western Sudan.

Across much of that belt, the old post-Cold War security architecture has weakened dramatically. French influence has receded. Military governments have grown stronger. Russian security networks have expanded. Borders have become routes for weapons, gold, fighters and contraband as much as lines of effective state administration.

The authority of the internationally recognised state remains visible on maps.

On the ground, sovereignty is increasingly divisible.

On the other side lies the Nile–Red Sea–Gulf system.

Egypt regards Sudan as part of its immediate strategic hinterland.

Saudi Arabia regards the western shore of the Red Sea as essential to its security.

The United Arab Emirates has developed a network of commercial, political and security interests extending across the Red Sea, the Horn, Libya and parts of the Sahel.

Iran has rebuilt ties with the Sudanese military.

Turkey, Russia and others possess their own Red Sea ambitions.

The result is not two disciplined blocs.

It is something less orderly and perhaps more dangerous:

two geopolitical ecosystems meeting inside states too weak to keep them apart.

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WHO BACKS WHOM?

Here the map becomes especially revealing.

Egypt has generally been associated with support for Burhan and the regular army. Its reasons are understandable: Egypt prefers a conventional Sudanese state and conventional Sudanese armed forces on its southern border.

Iran has also strengthened military relations with the SAF.

Saudi Arabia has maintained relations with Burhan while attempting to operate as a mediator, notably through the Jeddah process.

The UAE, by contrast, has repeatedly been accused of providing support to Hemedti's RSF. Abu Dhabi denies accusations that it arms the paramilitary force. European and other analyses nevertheless describe extensive RSF commercial and logistical connections stretching through Chad and Libya and linking Sudanese gold, Gulf markets and regional military networks.

Russia illustrates how little this resembles the Cold War.

Russian-linked networks historically developed relations with the RSF and Sudan's gold economy.

Moscow has simultaneously cultivated relations with the Sudanese state and sought access to the Red Sea.

The great powers no longer necessarily choose one client and remain with him.

They hedge.

They bargain.

They buy access.

They change sides.

This is not bloc politics.

It is market politics conducted with armies.

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THE GREAT RIFT

So what, precisely, is moving away from what?

The deepest separation may be this:

The interior belt from the western Sahel toward Sudan is moving away from the political order that Europe and the United States assumed would dominate Africa after the Cold War — civilian governments, Western security assistance, multilateral mediation and internationally supervised transitions.

It has not moved toward one alternative system.

That is the point.

It has fragmented.

Into juntas.

Private armies.

Paramilitary forces.

Jihadist insurgencies.

Russian security relationships.

Turkish weapons.

Gulf money.

Chinese infrastructure.

Gold networks.

Local war economies.

Across its eastern edge, meanwhile, the Red Sea and Gulf are becoming a strategic system of their own, dominated increasingly not by European powers but by regional states with money, ports, drones, shipping interests and military ambitions.

Sudan is where these two movements meet.

The Sahel arrives from the west.

The Gulf arrives from the east.

Egypt descends from the north.

The Horn presses from the southeast.

And the Nile runs through the middle.

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WHY THE WORLD LOOKS AWAY

There is another uncomfortable question.

Why has a catastrophe of this scale attracted so little sustained attention?

Part of the answer is competition.

Ukraine commands Europe.

Israel, Gaza, Iran and the Gulf command the Middle East.

Sudan falls between editorial maps.

It is African when foreign desks are concentrating on the Middle East.

It is Arab when African desks are looking farther south.

It is therefore perpetually at the edge of somebody else's page.

But there is a more disturbing reason.

Sudan is difficult to narrate.

There is no easy ideological division.

No NATO confronting Russia.

No Israel confronting Iran.

No simple government-versus-insurgency structure.

The two principal armed camps were once allies.

Foreign powers overlap rather than divide cleanly.

Militias change affiliations.

Local wars lie inside the national war.

And underneath everything remain older fractures inherited from Darfur, the long north-south conflict, the secession of South Sudan and decades of rule from Khartoum.

Complex wars receive less attention than simple ones.

They do not produce good slogans.

They nevertheless produce bodies.

The Council on Foreign Relations has described Sudan as one of the world's most neglected major conflicts; humanitarian organisations continue to describe displacement and hunger there on a scale unmatched by almost any other contemporary emergency.

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FROM THE ATLANTIC TO THE GULF

Take the map one last time.

Begin near the Atlantic.

The western Sahara and Sahel form the first edge.

Move through Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger — countries where the old relationship with Europe has sharply weakened.

Continue into Chad, the corridor between the Sahel and Sudan.

Enter Darfur.

Cross Kordofan.

Reach the Nile.

Continue to Port Sudan and the Red Sea.

Across the water, the same strategic world continues through Yemen and finally into the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf.

This does not constitute one war.

It constitutes something potentially more important:

one connected zone of instability.

Weapons cross it.

Money crosses it.

Drones cross it.

Mercenaries cross it.

Gold crosses it.

Refugees cross it.

Political influence crosses it.

The frontier separating Africa from the Middle East exists far more clearly in atlases than it does in strategy.

Sudan demonstrates why.

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THE DRONE ABOVE THE MARKET

And so we return to al-Dibab.

A market town in West Kordofan.

People have finished shopping.

They gather around trucks that will take them back to their villages.

Some carry packages.

Some wait.

Some talk.

Some are simply trying to get home.

Above them is a drone.

Who manufactured it matters.

Who supplied it matters.

Who ordered the strike matters.

Who controls Kordofan matters.

Who ultimately controls Sudan matters.

Egypt cares.

The Emirates care.

Saudi Arabia cares.

Iran cares.

Russia cares.

The governments of the Sahel care.

Europe may discover eventually that it cares as well.

Because the strike on the market is not an isolated flash on a distant map.

It lies on a line.

And that line now stretches almost from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf.

We have become accustomed to looking north-east, toward the great fault line running from the Baltic to the Black Sea and beyond.

We might occasionally look south.

Another plate is moving.