On 30 September the government published nine orders tabling the 2027–2029 budget package in the State Duma. The same day, the Bank of Russia put out a new version of its monetary policy guidelines containing something the previous version did not: a box on budget policy. In it, for the first time in any document we have been able to open, is the reason the government wants to rewrite the budget rule.

Our piece of 27 September reported the $50 base oil price as a parameter of the submitted package and listed two things we did not know: why, and in which bill. Both now have an answer.

The reason, in the bank’s words

Box 9 of the draft guidelines for 2027–2029 says:

“Given the long-term trends in the world energy market and the risks to the sufficiency of the liquid part of the NWF, the Government of the Russian Federation proposes to adjust the trajectory of the base oil price in the budget rule, lowering it to 50 US dollars per barrel from 2027 and holding it at that level until 2029.”

The box did not exist in the version the bank’s board approved on 28 August. The bank’s own list of changes states that box 9 was added, among other things “taking into account the new budget projections for 2026–2029 presented at the session of the Government of the Russian Federation on 24 September 2026”.

So the clause is deliberate, and it is doing work. A base price is an accounting threshold, and a government may lower one for many reasons — prudence, a changed view of the oil market, a wish to borrow less. The sentence names two: the long-run energy market, and whether the liquid part of the National Wealth Fund will be enough.

That is not a stray phrase. The same reason recurs twice more in the same document, in the bank’s alternative scenarios, each time with a harsher number. In the “proinflationary” scenario the 2027 base price matches the baseline, but “given the risks to the sufficiency of the liquid part of the NWF a gradual reduction of it to 50 US dollars per barrel in 2028–2029 will be required”. In the “risk” scenario, heavy use of the fund “creates risks of a rapid exhaustion of the fund’s resources”, and what is then required is “a substantial transformation of the budget rule” — a base price of $40 in 2027 and $35 from 2028.

Across three different futures the variable that moves is the same one, and the thing it is being moved to protect is the fund.

What the rule does with that number

The base price is the line that splits oil and gas revenue in two. Revenue collected above it is additional revenue, which Minfin converts into currency and gold for the fund; when revenue falls short of the line, the fund’s liquid assets are sold to cover the gap. Our guide to oil and gas revenues sets out the monthly mechanics.

The schedule now in law is point 4 of article 96⁶ of the Budget Code, as amended by law No. 432-FZ of 28 November 2025, which we re-read this session: $59 a barrel in 2026, $58 in 2027, $57 in 2028, $56 in 2029 and $55 in 2030, with 2% annual indexation from 2031. Fifty dollars is $8 below the step written for 2027 and $5 below the endpoint the schedule was not due to reach until 2030.

The box also prices the move. Lowering the base price “will reduce the volume of oil and gas revenue taken into account in determining the ceiling on spending”, and on Minfin’s estimate the share of base oil and gas revenue in GDP “may contract by 0.4–0.5 percentage points”. The gap is to be filled from the other side: Minfin raised its estimate of non-oil-and-gas revenue by more than one percentage point of GDP, to 14.4–14.6% of GDP, citing the wider progressive income-tax base, higher charges on imports and the introduction of “a tax on additional income from favourable external conditions for the extractive sector” — the levy that reached the Duma on 30 September as a law of its own.

The bill it needs, and the one that is missing

We read all nine orders, 2706-r to 2714-r, in their official publication. They table: the federal budget for 2027–2029 (2706-r); amendments to the Budget Code (2707-r); amendments to parts one and two of the Tax Code (2708-r); a standalone federal law “On the tax on excess profits” (2709-r); the budgets of the Social Fund and of the compulsory medical insurance fund (2710-r, 2711-r); a law on the particulars of executing budgets in 2027, which also suspends and repeals provisions of other legislation (2712-r); and amendments to the Criminal Code and Criminal Procedure Code (2713-r) and to the Code of Administrative Offences (2714-r).

Under article 192 of the Budget Code, the government submits the draft budget “no later than 1 October of the current year”. It filed on 30 September, one day inside the deadline.

The base price lives in the Budget Code, and the package contains exactly one Budget Code bill. What that bill actually changes we cannot say: no text has been published, sozd.duma.gov.ru has been unreachable for six days and minfin.gov.ru has returned 503 for a fifth day. The proposal exists for us only as the central bank describes it.

Two features of the list are worth naming. The excess-profits tax is a separate law rather than an amendment to the Tax Code, and the Tax Code amendments arrive in the same package beside it — the ministry wrote a new statute rather than a new article. And 2712-r is the annual act suspending parts of budget legislation for a year, this time for 2027 alone; our 27 September piece described it from Minfin’s text as covering the three years, and the tabled bill’s own title corrects that.

Not in the package: any bill amending the 2026 budget law. The revision of this year’s deficit reported by The Moscow Times on 29 September has still not been tabled, and we have seen no document behind it.

A number the forecast and the proposal share

The guidelines are not a final text — the cover reads “Draft of 30 September 2026”, approved by the board on 29 September — and the forecast inside them was cut off on 23 July. The bank says so plainly: its baseline assumes a structural primary deficit of 2% of GDP in 2026, 1% in 2027 and 0.5% in 2028, reaching zero in 2029, and it “proceeds from the base price currently in force in the budget rule, established by the Budget Code”.

The new projections in box 9 are tighter: the structural primary deficit narrows to 0.6% in 2027 and 0.2% in 2028, reaching zero in 2029. The bank notes the trajectory runs “somewhat below the assumptions of the Bank of Russia’s July baseline forecast” — and then, in the same paragraph, that the contribution of fiscal policy in 2026–2028 “remains more significant than it was in the budget plans before their revision in 2026, which provided for a return to a zero structural primary deficit already this year”. The zero date moved from 2026 to 2029.

One figure sits in both halves of the document. The bank’s baseline forecast puts the price of Russian oil for tax purposes at $68 in 2024 and $56 in 2025 as outturns, $60 in 2026, and then $50 in each of 2027, 2028 and 2029 — the same number proposed as the base price. Under the rule it is the gap between the two that fills or drains the fund.

We are not turning that into an arithmetic of the fund, and the document does not either. Point 3 of article 96⁶ computes the additional and shortfall amounts from the base oil price together with the base gas export price, base export-alternative prices for AI-92 petrol and class-5 diesel, and the dollar–rouble rate; an oil price equal to the base price does not by itself mean nothing is credited. What can be said is where each half of the document puts that price. Minfin’s own view, recorded in the box, is that “the liquid part of the NWF will be replenished across the whole medium-term horizon”. The bank’s baseline, however, is built on the schedule in law, where the base price for 2027 is $58 — so inside its own assumptions the forecast price runs $8 under the line, which is the side of the line the fund is sold from, not added to. Measured instead against the $50 being proposed, the same forecast sits exactly on the line. Both readings are in one document, two pages apart.

The bank adds a caveat of its own that cuts against easy readings in both directions: “a lower base price does not in itself mean a reduction in the fiscal stimulus”. It raises the resilience of public finances and lowers the budget’s dependence on external prices only if spending is adjusted to match.

What this changes in our model

Nothing today. The base price is a proposal in a bill nobody has read, and neither of the two series that price would reach has moved.

Where it would land if adopted is the liquid part of the NWF, 29 of 100, about $46.7 billion at the end of August. The other series this story runs through, oil and gas revenues, 12 of 100 and running 16.0% below a year earlier, would not move: it measures the actual inflation-adjusted level of revenue against 2021, not the accounting threshold. What the threshold governs is how much of that revenue the budget may spend and how much is owed to the fund. The budget deficit stands at 65 of 100, a rolling twelve-month deficit of 3.3% of GDP. The strength index is 46.4 of 100, in the stress zone; all eight readings are on the monitor.

The box also forecasts that the deficit of regional budgets “will gradually contract and by 2029 approach a zero level”. Our regional balance currently reads −1.509 trillion roubles over the rolling year. That is a forecast in a document whose forecast is about to be revised, not a decision, and we record it as such.

What we do not know

What the Budget Code bill says. No text, no bill number. Whether $50 replaces the whole $58→$55 schedule permanently, what happens to the 2% indexation from 2031, and whether the base gas export price of $250 per thousand cubic metres moves with it — all unread.

Who pays the excess-profits tax. The order tables a law by its title only. The name in the box — a tax on additional income from favourable external conditions for the extractive sector — is not the name on the bill, and we cannot tell from either document which organisations fall inside it or from what base.

The rouble parameters of the budget. Revenue, spending, deficit and defence spending for each of the three years are circulating in the press. We have opened no primary carrying them and print none.

Whether the 2026 deficit is being revised. Nine orders, none of them about the 2026 budget law. Orders 2704-r, 2705-r, 2715-r to 2719-r and 2723-r do not appear in the 30 September feed at all, and we cannot say what they are.