On 7 September Minfin published its monthly statement on the placement of National Wealth Fund money. In August the fund moved 190.3 bn roubles from its liquid part into illiquid assets, 95.8% of it into aviation. Over the same month, the accounts holding the liquid part lost 9,753.8 kg of gold and 5,687.3 mn yuan. Yet their rouble value rose by 305.2 bn, and the newswires reported that the fund had grown.
What the ministry recorded for August
Six placements, in the ministry's own order:
“In August 2026 NWF money was placed in financial assets: in the sum of 115,303.7 mn roubles — in the bonds of OOO Aviakapital-Service, to finance the infrastructure project ‘Project for the concessional leasing of domestically produced aircraft’; in the sum of 67,000.0 mn roubles — in the bonds of the State Corporation Rostec.”
The other four are 4,651.7 mn roubles into GTLK bonds for river and sea vessel leasing, and three deposits at VEB.RF — 1,684.5 mn for the Nizhny Novgorod tram system, 1,547.9 mn for rolling stock at the Petersburg metro, and 134.9 mn for Perm — each at 5% a year, running to December 2042 and August 2047. They add up to 190,322.7 mn roubles.
Money also came back, but much less of it. Issuers made partial redemptions of 4,691.9 mn roubles — Aviakapital-Service 1,718.6, GTLK 1,417.3, NLK-Finance 1,020.1, Avtodor 535.9 — and VEB.RF returned 386.6 mn early from two Moscow metro leasing deposits. That is 5,078.5 mn roubles in against 190,322.7 mn out: the outflow was 37 times the inflow. Net, 185.2 bn roubles left the part of the fund the budget can spend.
August stands out on this measure. We read the three preceding statements in the same series. Placements were 872.7 mn roubles in May, 93,880.0 mn in June and 3,098.1 mn in July. August was more than twice the largest of the three.
Aviation took 95.8% of it
Aviakapital-Service leases Russian-built aircraft; the Rostec money finances a programme to expand production of aircraft, engines, instruments and components. Together they are 182,303.7 mn of the 190,322.7 mn placed — 95.8%.
The size becomes clear against the positions themselves. On 1 September the fund held 288,400.6 mn roubles of Aviakapital-Service paper and 570,485.9 mn of Rostec paper. August alone accounted for 40.0% of the first position and 11.7% of the second. Two fifths of everything the fund has ever put into the aircraft-leasing company went in during one month.
These are not marketable securities. The statement gives a rate and a maturity for every VEB.RF deposit, but neither for either bond issue. The only route back into cash that the file records is redemption by the issuer on its own schedule — 1,718.6 mn roubles from Aviakapital-Service in August, against 115,303.7 mn going the other way.
The liquid part went up. Its contents went down.
Minfin states the liquid part directly, as money in the fund's accounts at the Bank of Russia:
“As at 1 September 2026 the volume of the Fund's liquid assets (money in bank accounts at the Bank of Russia) came to the equivalent of 3,997,967.1 mn roubles or 46,704.8 mn US dollars (1.7% of the GDP forecast for 2026).”
A month earlier the same sentence read 3,692,785.4 mn roubles, 46,242.3 mn dollars, 1.6% of GDP. In roubles the liquid part grew by 305.2 bn, or 8.3%. In dollars it grew by 1.0%.
What those accounts actually hold is itemised in both statements. On 1 August: 189,683.3 mn yuan and 141,241.7 kg of gold. On 1 September: 183,996.0 mn yuan, 131,487.9 kg of gold and 1,682.1 mn roubles. The yuan holding fell by 5,687.3 mn, or 3.0%. The gold holding fell by 9,753.8 kg, or 6.9%.
So the same accounts are worth 8.3% more roubles and contain 6.9% less gold. The statement records no additions to them in August. In June the ministry had converted 8,762.8 mn roubles into 786.4 mn yuan, and separately credited to these accounts 3,460.6 mn yuan and 5,150.3 kg of gold bought with budget money between January 2025 and February 2026 under the budget rule. The August statement records neither a conversion nor a credit of either kind.
The arithmetic closes exactly
The statement never gives the revaluation for a single month. It reports the exchange-rate and gold revaluation as a running total for the year — 594,786.0 mn roubles for January to August, of which 543,091.9 mn falls on the currency and gold balances at the Bank of Russia. The July statement gives the same lines for January to July: 67,217.9 mn and 52,666.1 mn.
Subtracting one cumulative figure from the other is our arithmetic, not the ministry's. But both figures are the ministry's own and use the same basis. August's revaluation of the currency and gold balances was 490.4 bn roubles.
Set that against the 305.2 bn the liquid part actually gained, and the rest of the month's movement was −185.2 bn. The net conversion into illiquid assets was 185,244.2 mn roubles. The two figures agree to a tenth of a million.
That is the whole story of the month in one line. Revaluation added 490.4 bn to the liquid part; operations took 185.2 bn out of it; the reported figure rose by the difference. Every rouble of the increase is a price change, and the only thing that moved in the other direction was the fund.
The same subtraction splits the revaluation. Both statements break the figure into currency and gold: 125,777.3 mn and −73,111.2 mn through July, 297,254.1 mn and 245,837.8 mn through August. So August alone was 171.5 bn roubles on the currency and 318.9 bn on the gold. The gold on the fund's books gained 318.9 bn roubles of value in the month in which 9,753.8 kg of it stopped being there.
The number the wires reported
Interfax led on the fund growing by 474 bn roubles to 13.2 trn. That is arithmetically right: the total was 12,720,845.3 mn roubles on 1 August and 13,194,879.6 mn on 1 September, a difference of 474,034.3 mn.
It is also the one measure that cannot show what happened. Moving money from a Bank of Russia account into Rostec bonds changes the composition of the total, not the total itself. The part of the fund that is not liquid went from 9,028,059.9 mn roubles to 9,196,912.5 mn over the same month. The headline number counts both parts and reports their sum.
This is the distinction our Liquid NWF indicator exists to preserve. On 4 September we wrote that when a sale happens inside the fund, the two lines to read are the total and the other permitted assets, because the difference between them is what we score. This month that difference moved in the wrong direction, for a reason the total cannot show.
A one-off 504.4 bn in the same file
The same statement records money going the other way, into the budget rather than the fund. In August the federal budget received 504,440.3 mn roubles of income from assets the NWF is invested in, across twelve positions. One of them is 84.3% of the total:
“In August 2026 the federal budget received income from the placement of the Fund's money: 1) in ordinary shares of PJSC Sberbank — in the sum of 425,086.4 mn roubles, equivalent to 5,126.4 mn US dollars.”
VTB contributed 36,506.5 mn, DOM.RF 24,159.0 mn and Aeroflot 12,508.6 mn. These are dividends, paid once a year, and this is the month they landed.
When Minfin publishes August budget execution in a fortnight, this half-trillion will be included as non-oil-and-gas revenue. It is not a figure of ours and it does not change our deficit indicator, which reads the rolling twelve-month federal deficit at 3.3% of GDP through July. We note it now because a month flattered by a once-a-year dividend is easy to mistake for a trend, and the dividend will not repeat in September.
What this changes in our model
Nothing yet, and the reason is uncomfortable. Our indicator scores the liquid part as a level in nominal dollars: 28 out of 100 at $46.2 bn on 1 August, against a pre-war anchor of $113.5 bn and a registered trouble line of $20 bn. The parser reads it from the ministry's monthly workbook, which still carries the 1 August data.
When the September figure arrives, the indicator will read $46.7 bn. It will rise in the month in which the fund's liquid part was drained by the largest amount we can see in any of the four statements we read. The dollar denomination and the level test are deliberate — rates flatter a bad year — but neither protects against this. A cushion that loses 3.0% of its yuan and 6.9% of its gold, in a month when the ministry's own books revalued that gold upward by 318.9 bn roubles, is smaller in the only sense that matters to a ministry that has bills to pay. Our number will not say so.
We are not changing the indicator to fix that. Moving a threshold or a denominator after seeing a reading is the one thing this site does not do. What we will do is publish the composition of the liquid part beside the dollar figure, because the composition is what the ministry itself discloses and what the dollar figure hides.
What we do not know
Whether these placements were inside an approved limit for 2026 or above it: the statement gives no list of approved self-financing infrastructure projects and no annual ceilings. The rates and maturities on the Aviakapital-Service and Rostec bonds: the file gives them for every VEB.RF deposit and for neither bond. How much gold and how many yuan were sold to fund the placements, as against any other movement: the statement reports quantities on two dates, never the transactions between them. Whether anything was credited to these accounts in August under the budget rule: the statement records no such entry, and the June statement shows that crediting can lag the purchase by more than a year, so an entry may yet appear for purchases already made. And what the aircraft bonds are worth. Under the file's own footnote, the fund carries its shareholdings in Sberbank, VTB, DOM.RF and Aeroflot at market value, and everything else at the sums placed.