The National Wealth Fund (Fond natsionalnogo blagosostoyaniya, the NWF or ФНБ) is Russia's sovereign rainy-day fund. In peacetime it banked oil-and-gas windfalls — revenue collected whenever the price rose above the cut-off set in the budget — for a bad year. The war is that bad year. With Western capital markets closed and oil-and-gas revenues under pressure, the fund is the government's last reserve before it has to print money to cover the gap.
The number that matters is the liquid part
The headline size of the fund is misleading. This is the single most important thing to understand about it. The fund holds two very different kinds of assets. One part is liquid — foreign currency and gold held at the central bank, which the finance ministry can sell for rubles tomorrow. The other is illiquid — money already spent on domestic projects, shares in state companies, and infrastructure loans. Those assets cannot readily pay a soldier or a contractor; turning them into cash in a hurry would mean dumping strategic stakes at a loss, if a buyer could be found at all.
So the headline total can stay large while the part that can actually be spent shrinks. Our monitor tracks only the liquid NWF — the total minus illiquid assets — because only that money can meet a deficit.
Why it is the buffer in the chain
When oil-and-gas revenues fall, the deficit still has to be paid. The ordinary way to finance it is domestic borrowing — selling OFZ bonds. When those auctions fail to raise the money, it comes from the liquid NWF instead. That is why the fund sits where it does in the causal chain: it is the buffer that absorbs the deficit after revenue falls and borrowing fails. Behind it lies only the central bank's printing press — which shows up in the money supply, not here.
Where the trouble line is
Our registered trouble line for the liquid fund is below $20 billion. The anchor is arithmetic, not a guess: at the registered deficit range of ₽6.5–7.5 trillion a year, $20 billion is roughly ₽1.6 trillion, or 2.5–3 months of that deficit. Below that, the fund is a cash float, not a cushion. The threshold was registered in advance and does not move in response to a reading; the reasoning is on the methodology page.
What crossing it does not mean
Crossing the line is not a collapse date. A government with an empty liquid fund still has options, each with its own cost: pressure state banks to buy its bonds, monetize the deficit through the central bank, raise taxes, or cut spending. Each leaves its own mark elsewhere in the monitor — which is the point of watching eight indicators rather than one. The honest statement is narrower than "the money runs out": as the liquid fund shrinks, the deficit has fewer orderly places to land. The monitor measures the level against pre-war 2021; it never predicts a date.