[OC] The Further from Russia, the Less You Care: European Defense Spending vs Distance from the Eastern Front

Posted by einmaulwurf

16 comments

  1. Inspired by [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1hyuhaw/the_association_between_defence_spending_and/) post in r/europe I created by own version with updated values from 2024 and the shortest distance from border-to-border (excluding exlaves, especially Kaliningrad).

    Values on defence spending are from [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_in_Europe_by_military_expenditures) and the geospatial data from Eurostat. All analysis and plotting is done in R using the tidyverse packages, namely dplyr and ggplot2.

  2. I guess you COULD draw that line but it’s a massive stretch to IMO

  3. Neat. Poland borders with Russia (Kalingrad), so 0 on x-axis, I think

  4. Good example of how you can politicise data. What’s your r2? This is an awful way to support your argument.

  7. Ireland is not in NATO, what’s the point here putting it? It’s as relevant as Morocco in security levels regarding Russia?

  9. Norway ‘s defence spending as percent of GNP in 2024 was 2.17%. I get a little worried when I spot a very obvious error. Don’t have time to check the rest.

  10. **Where is** ***USA*** ??? The Bering Strait that separates US and Russia is 85 km (53 mi) wide, but within the Straight is a pair of islands that are only 3.8 km (2.4 mi) apart. Take your pick, USA and Russia are adjacent neighbors and USA should be on that graph.

  11. I noticed that the US doesn’t fit on the graph…

  12. Moldova pretty much have Russia camping in their backyard

  15. All too close to each other, some very near countries have low spending while very far have a high spending, the line is almost flat, this doesn’t point to anything really

  16. Do a graph comparing IMF loans to defense spending and see what it looks like.

    Are they being leant money by the US to buy US weapons?

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