What the figure measures
Inflation here means the rise in the prices households pay for a fixed basket of goods and services, as recorded in the consumer price index of Rosstat, the state statistics service. Rosstat publishes the index every month on its prices page, along with weekly indices for a narrower list of individual goods and services. The monitor uses the monthly series only.
From the monthly index the monitor builds one number: the change against the same month a year earlier, computed as the product of the twelve latest month-on-month indices. The calculation links the twelve monthly changes between those two observations; it does not use Rosstat's narrower weekly indices.
Why a pace and not a level
Most indicators on this monitor are levels measured against where they stood before the war. Consumer prices cannot be read that way. The price level in Russia is far above its 2021 level, so comparing today's prices with pre-war prices carries forward every cumulative increase. What can return to a pre-war value is the speed at which prices rise. The monitor therefore compares the current pace with the pace Russia had before the war.
The pre-war anchor and the trouble line
The pre-war pace is taken from what actually happened. Rosstat's own December-to-December inflation was 2.5% in 2017, 4.3% in 2018, 3.0% in 2019, 4.9% in 2020 and 8.4% in 2021, an average of 4.6%. That is the monitor's 100.
It was not always so. Until 22 August 2026 the anchor was the central bank's 4% target: a figure the bank aimed at, not a measurement of what happened before the war. It was replaced with the measured average so that inflation, like every other indicator, is anchored to a recorded pre-war fact; the change is dated in the amendment record.
The registered trouble line, worth 0, is 40% a year. It is taken from the economic literature on inflation crises (Bruno and Easterly, 1998), and it was fixed in advance, not fitted to Russian data.
Why the reading can be held down
Some prices in the basket are administered rather than set by the market, and fuel is partly shielded from world prices: the finance ministry pays refiners a subsidy, the damper, for selling fuel at home below export parity, and it shows up as a negative line inside oil and gas revenue in the ministry's monthly budget data. In 2026 the government also extended through 30 September a ban on diesel exports by direct producers, most recently by decree, limiting that route out of the domestic market.
Measures like these can keep the index lower than it would be without them. That is why the monitor's methodology treats inflation with caution: the basket and the administered prices in it can be managed, and under stress the signal can even point the wrong way.
Why inflation confirms rather than triggers
The monitor groups its indicators into classes according to how far the state can steer the number. Inflation is class 3, with other prices and ratios. It can confirm strain that other indicators show, but it never triggers a verdict: class-3 readings do not count towards a trigger at all.
Its place in the chain explains the rest. Pressure from a widening budget gap reaches prices last: after the budget deficit has opened, after the reserve fund has been drawn on, and after money growth has picked up. Inflation is the point where that pressure becomes visible to households, and the guide to the money supply covers the step just before it.
What a reading does and does not tell you
A high reading does not identify its cause. The index records the combined movement of the basket; it does not separate what drove those changes. The monitor does not claim to.
A low reading does not prove that pressure has eased. Regulated prices and fuel subsidies can hold the index down while strain builds elsewhere, which is why this indicator is read alongside the others, not on its own.
Weekly estimates and monthly observations are not interchangeable. In a CBR research bulletin, the table marked the August inflation reading as an estimate based on weekly data, not an observed figure. The monitor, by contrast, uses Rosstat's monthly file only.
The live reading
Below this guide is the most recent year-on-year inflation rate and its score, where 4.6% a year is 100 and 40% is 0. It changes when Rosstat publishes the next monthly index.