On 31 August the CBR published the draft “Monetary Policy Guidelines for 2027 and the period of 2028 and 2029”. Once a year, this document sets out the assumptions behind the bank’s forecast for the next three years. Its Board of Directors approved the draft on 28 August. The introduction contains a sentence found in no published government act: the government has still not set the revised path to a zero structural primary deficit.
What the introduction says
“Since the Government of the Russian Federation has not yet set the revised path for reducing the structural primary deficit to zero by 2029, the Bank of Russia’s baseline scenario assumes a gradual reduction from 2% of GDP in 2026 to 1% of GDP in 2027 and 0.5% of GDP in 2028, reaching zero in 2029.”
The numbers underpinning the central bank’s three-year forecast are not the government’s. They are the CBR’s own assumption, filling the gap left by a decision that does not exist.
A decision known only at second hand
Section 2 says when the bank learned of the change:
“However, after taking into account information from the Government of the Russian Federation in June 2026 that the transition to a zero structural primary deficit in the federal budget would be deferred until 2029, the Bank of Russia began to assume that the fiscal impulse in the coming years would be stronger than previously expected.”
No act number, no date, no indication of how the information was conveyed. The only public record of a change to the country’s three-year fiscal framework is a paraphrase in a central-bank document.
What the baseline rests on
Section 3 names the source outright:
“The baseline scenario’s fiscal-policy assumptions rest on public comments by representatives of Russia’s Minfin about gradually reducing the federal budget’s structural primary deficit to zero in 2029.”
The Board approved the baseline scenario on 24 July. The document was prepared using statistics available on 21 August, while the forecast calculations have a 23 July data cut-off. The CBR says it will revise all fiscal assumptions after the new budget projections are published in the autumn of 2026. In other words, at the end of August 2026 there is no officially approved medium-term budget path — and the bank itself records that fact.
What deferral costs
Later in the same Section 2, the CBR states the cost of a stronger fiscal impulse: “This means less room for easing monetary policy.” Delayed consolidation means a higher key rate — and therefore costlier debt service and credit for every other borrower.
In the baseline, the CBR assumes the current fiscal-rule base oil price set by the Budget Code. Both alternative scenarios lower it. In the “Proinflationary” scenario, “taking into account the risks to the adequacy of the liquid part of the NWF, a gradual reduction to 50 US dollars per barrel in 2028–2029 will be required.” In the “Risk” scenario, a slump in commodity prices means:
“…this will lead to intensive use of the liquid part of the NWF, creating a risk that the fund’s resources will be exhausted quickly. In view of this, the fiscal rule will have to be substantially transformed, with a gradual shift to new base oil price levels — 40 US dollars per barrel in 2027 and 35 US dollars per barrel from 2028.”
On 21 August we examined an interview with Minfin’s budget-policy department, in which the ministry acknowledged in writing for the first time that the current path — minus $1 per barrel a year to $55 by 2030 — is not enough. Minfin gave no new price then. The numbers have now appeared, but in someone else’s document and only as the CBR’s scenario assumptions. In the baseline balance-of-payments forecast, the “Change in reserve assets” row is negative in every year shown.
An episode not previously named
Box 8 records something the bank had not put this plainly before:
“The suspension of the fiscal rule in March–April 2026 also showed that temporary changes to the parameters or operating procedure tend, on the contrary, to amplify short-term exchange-rate volatility…”
The document does not name the decision by which the suspension was enacted.
What this changes in our model
Nothing — and that is worth saying plainly. The federal budget deficit scores 65 out of 100 and measures the rolling twelve-month deficit as a share of GDP using Minfin data. The Guidelines use the structural primary deficit: adjusted for oil-and-gas price swings, excluding interest costs, and forecast rather than observed. These are different quantities. The 2% of GDP in this document cannot be set beside the 3.3% brought in by the parser.
What moved is not the number but the target it was supposed to return to: the normalisation horizon slipped by three years. Liquid NWF scores 28 out of 100. The bank assumes falling reserve assets throughout the forecast horizon and, in its worst scenario, explicitly names the risk of the fund running dry. The rest is on the monitor.
What we do not know
The main thing is missing from the document: exactly what the government told the bank in June, how it did so, and whether the information exists in writing. We do not know when the autumn budget projections will appear — the CBR says only “in the autumn of 2026” — or whether the government’s path will match the bank’s assumption. If it does not, the baseline scenario will have to be rewritten. The document does not explain why the fiscal rule was suspended in March–April. It never gives a monetary value for the liquid part of the NWF: not one balance figure, only references to the risk of exhaustion.