From 1 September every Russian region may borrow from the Federal Treasury at 0.1% a year for up to a month, bridging the gap between paying its bills and receiving its revenue. Minfin announced the change at noon on 1 September. Until then the instrument had been piloted in four regions. The release does not identify the government decree that extended it nationwide, and the decree is not on the portal of legal acts.
What Minfin said
The release opens with the change itself:
“From 1 September the instrument for providing regions with treasury credits ‘on demand’ is being extended to the whole country. It was previously tested in four regions as a pilot. The corresponding decree of the Government of the Russian Federation has been adopted to carry out the President’s instructions.”
The terms come from Deputy Minister of Finance Pavel Kadochnikov:
“Our task is to help regions meet their expenditure obligations on time without taking on commercial credit. The treasury credit ‘on demand’ is provided at a preferential rate of 0.1% a year for a term of up to one month and makes it possible to cover cash gaps promptly until planned revenues arrive. This reduces regions’ spending on servicing the state debt and increases the stability of budgets.”
The procedure takes one sentence: to obtain such a credit, a region sends Minfin a request and attaches the cash plan for executing its budget. The release names no limit — not per region, not in aggregate. It gives a rate and a term, and no other financial condition.
A rate that is not a price
At 0.1% a year for up to a month, this is not a loan in the market sense; it is a federal overdraft. On 100 million roubles drawn for a full month, the interest is a little over 8,000 roubles. The rate does not allocate credit or price risk. It makes the facility formally a credit rather than a transfer.
That has two consequences, and Minfin states the first itself. Regions stop turning to commercial banks to bridge these gaps, and their debt-servicing costs fall. But they fall because the federal single account now closes the cash gap: the risk moves off bank balance sheets and onto the federal one. It does not disappear.
The second consequence follows from the price. At an annual rate of 0.1% for a month, there is no reason for a region not to draw — the facility is close to free, and a treasurer who declines it is simply paying more for the same liquidity. Take-up will therefore not be a clean measure of distress. It will measure distress plus the ordinary prudence of using a cheap facility that is available.
The pilot that became national
Minfin's own wording deserves attention. It does not say the pilot succeeded. It says the instrument “was tested in four regions as a pilot” — and then it was extended nationwide. The release does not say which four regions took part; neither do the media reports.
The design went through public consultation in the spring. A Minfin draft decree, “On the conduct by the Federal Treasury in 2026 of an experiment in providing a budget credit to top up the balance of funds in the single account of the budget of a constituent entity of the Russian Federation”, registry number 01/01/05-26/00168092, was posted on 22 May 2026. We pulled its record from the portal's API: public discussion ran from 22 May to 6 June 2026, the status is “discussion ended”, the project has 327 views and zero comments, and its field for the linked adopted act is empty. A nationwide mechanism for regional liquidity passed through consultation without a single submission.
The decree is not on the portal
The release calls the act only “the corresponding decree of the Government”. We checked. In the block of government acts on publication.pravo.gov.ru, the most recent publications are dated 1 September and carry acts signed on 31 August: decree No. 1113, then Nos. 1116 to 1120. Nos. 1114 and 1115 are missing from the sequence, and as of this morning there are no publications dated 2 September at all. The government's own site, government.ru, has no release about it either; its most recent budget documents are the reserve-fund orders of 31 August.
So the terms that govern the facility are public in one place only: a press release. What happens if a region does not repay within the month, whether there is a ceiling per region or in total, whether the number of requests in a year is capped — none of it is public. Yesterday we described the same pattern in the fuel regime, where published government decrees implement a presidential decree whose text has never appeared. The instrument here is different, but the shape is the same: the rule is in force, and the text of the rule is not available.
What this changes in our model
Nothing today, and that is worth stating plainly. Regional budgets score 28 out of 100; the rolling twelve-month consolidated regional balance stood at −1.616 trillion roubles through July. This facility does not move that number and, by design, is unlikely to move it much later either.
A credit drawn and repaid within a month leaves little or no trace in an annual consolidated balance. That is the awkward part. The instrument helps regions with exactly the problem our indicator is meant to detect — running out of cash between revenue dates — while leaving a fainter trace than the commercial loan it replaces. A region that borrows from a bank shows up as regional debt. A region that borrows from the Treasury for three weeks barely shows up at all.
We are not saying the figures will be wrong. We are saying the facility can grow while the series stays flat, and that a flat series will then tell us less than it did before. We noted a related shift on 19 August, when regional support moved into programmes whose amounts are set outside the budget line we read.
What we do not know
The number and date of the decree, first of all — we established only that it is not on the portal, not that it does not exist; Minfin says it was adopted. We do not know which four regions ran the pilot, nor over what period, nor how much they drew. There is no published limit, no rule on repeated requests, and no stated consequence of failing to repay within the month. We do not know whether the Federal Treasury will publish volumes of credits issued; without that the facility is invisible from outside, and even the crude measure — how large the drawings are and how often they are made — will not exist. We also do not know the relationship between the May draft and the act Minfin says was adopted: the portal's record links no adopted act to that project.