Verbose
Deity
It is a phenomenon of the sociology of conflict, that when two parties simply don't trust each other enough to even agree on the basic outline of a situation, one of the things they can resort to is quantification. I.e. counting stuff. Still, the figures themselves even when agreed upon, require interpretation as to what they are supposed to mean.
Figure pulled from SIPRI, among the lists collected on the wikipedia page about military spending. I'm rounding off the figures a tad too, to not clutter it up too much:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
Your figure are off for the examples other than Canada, which spends about 750+ USD/capita compared to a Russian 640. Sweden spends in the range of 620 and Belgium 510. And that's two 10 million countries that don't get any of the scale effects Russia does at pop 140 million, or even Canada with 30 million. Small countries always need to spend proportionally more to just maintain a lot of basic military capabilities, since these can't fall below a certain volume and still be viable.
It's in the relative expenditures things get weird. What the figures really point to is how relatively economically weak Russia is compared to western Europe and north America. And yet Russia makes the political decision it needs to spend a LOT more on guns than on butter relative everyone else... It's been duly noted. (Especially when the stuff Russia spends its money on ends up outside Russia.)
As for a 4,4% of GDP being a "moderate" level, that's extremely questionable. Compared to what? Compared to the Soviet Union's military expense? Positively frugal...
Compared to the US? About the same. But then again, would a Russian consider the US military expenditure "moderate"? It's not really how it's otherwise seen...
Compared to the western Europeans, 4,4% is huge. It's 11th place globally alongside the US. Most of the countries ahead of Russia on the list tend to be Mid eastern (Saudi, Jordan, UAE, Isreal), at war more or less (Azeris) and/or nuts (NK, Eritrea).
More relevant actually is that even at the height the Cold War, the NATO European expenditure tended to hover around 3%. The end of the cold war has meant a reduction to somewhere in the 1-2,5% range, with France and the UK in the upper end, and not least because both maintain their of strategic nuclear forces, which cost a fair amount of money, something that admittedly has to be extended to Russia as well.
For a peace-time economy Russian military spending is high. In relation to the size of the population it's relatively high, but not exceptional. As an expression of economic priorities, in relation to the overall size of the economy, the Russian figure is again decidedly high. In absolute numbers in a global comparison, it's the third highest in the world...
It's perhaps "moderate" compared to Israel, or the US, and certainly to the old Soviet Union. But for a country as relatively economically weak as Russia, population size making up for a fair amount of the relative weakness, the numbers are strikingly high; i.e. "militarization".
If we all spent like Russia did, the list would go something like this:
Spoiler :
But maybe after all we all should spend 4,4% on our militaries, seeing how to a Russian evaluation it's so very reasonable and moderate? If things keep up like they've started, we might be looking at something like that.
It's just that almost no one spends on arms like Russia does, and an adjustment to the Russian "moderate" level would going to trigger The Mother Of All Arms Races the likes of which we haven't seen, well, since the 1930's or so...
Hell, even the South Koreans, preparing to fight off the North Koreans if worst comes to worst, would need to up their spending some 40% to reach Russian levels. Similarly the Taiwanese need a 100% increase, while preparing to fend of mainland China. In the Korean or Taiwanese cases, everybody KNOWS who the hardware and troops are FOR. In the matter of the massive Russian build-up, well? Except that it is decidedly not friendly-looking...
