At noon on 5 October Minfin published its monthly budget-rule announcement. From 7 October to 6 November it will buy 279.42 billion roubles of foreign currency and gold, 12.7 billion a day. In September the same operation ran at 2.5 billion a day.
Read as a headline, that is the national wealth fund being topped up at the fastest rate in three years. Read against the ministry's own monthly workbook, which we opened in this session, it is something else: a single month's purchase larger than all the surplus oil and gas revenue Russia has actually collected in 2026.
Both numbers come from the same ministry. Only one of them is money that has arrived.
What was announced
The release is four sentences long. Its operative part:
“The expected volume of additional oil and gas revenues of the federal budget is forecast in October 2026 at 289.46 billion roubles. The aggregate deviation of actually received oil and gas revenues from the expected monthly volume of oil and gas revenues, and of the estimate of the base monthly volume of oil and gas revenues from the base monthly volume of oil and gas revenues, as at the results of September 2026 came to −10.04 billion roubles. Thus the aggregate volume of funds directed to the purchase of foreign currency and gold will come to 279.42 billion roubles.”
The arithmetic checks out: 289.46 − 10.04 = 279.42. So does the daily figure — 22 working days fall between 7 October and 6 November, counting 4 November as the holiday it is, and 279.42 divided by 22 is 12.70.
The structure of that sum is the whole story. 289.46 billion of it is a forecast of October. The part that reflects money actually received is the −10.04 billion correction for September, and it is negative.
Against the ministry's own series
The ministry publishes the monthly series behind these announcements in a workbook running back to 2018. Its line for the volume of purchases and sales reads, for 2026, in billions of roubles:
| Month | Operation |
|---|---|
| January | −192.1 |
| February | −226.8 |
| March | none |
| April | none |
| May | 110.3 |
| June | 208.2 |
| July | 123.2 |
| August | 136.2 |
| September | 55.6 |
| October | 279.4 |
A minus is a sale. For the first two months of the year the ministry was selling currency, in March and April the rule was suspended and there were no operations at all, and from May it has been buying. October is roughly five times September.
It is also the largest monthly purchase since November 2023, when the figure was 621.1 billion. Nothing in the intervening thirty-four months came close: the best month of 2024 was April at 235.3 billion, and 2025 never passed 70.2 billion in a month before spending its entire second half selling.
The number that inverts it
The same workbook carries a line called additional oil and gas revenues — actual receipts minus the base monthly volume calculated at the base oil price. It is the surplus the budget rule exists to capture. For 2026, month by month: −182.2, −153.2, −234.3, 21.0, 174.8, 209.6, 291.9, −3.8, 41.0.
Those nine months add to 164.8 billion roubles. We recomputed them, and spot-checked the arithmetic the ministry used to produce them: September's 41.0 is total oil and gas revenue of 452.4 billion less a base volume of 411.4; August's −3.8 is 424.0 less 427.8.
So the surplus actually collected in the nine months to September is 164.8 billion roubles, and the purchase announced for the single month from 7 October is 279.42 billion. The month is worth more than the year, because the month is a forecast and the year is an outturn.
There is a further sign of the same thing inside the release. The −10.04 billion correction for September is a smoothed figure. The workbook's own reference line, which gives the correction without the even distribution of profit-based oil tax across the quarter, puts September's shortfall at −59.7 billion. The gap between the two is not forgiven; it is carried forward.
The explanation that does not hold
The obvious defence of the jump is the calendar: October is a month in which the profit-based tax on oil falls due, so of course the forecast is large.
The ministry's own method rules that out, and so does its own history. The footnote to the workbook states that the forecast and base volumes of that tax are each distributed evenly across the months of the current quarter — the smoothing exists precisely so that the quarterly lump does not drive the monthly operation. And the record agrees. October 2024 brought 491.6 billion roubles of that tax and a purchase of 71.8 billion. October 2025 brought 327.8 billion of it and a sale of 13.9 billion. Being an October has not produced a jump before.
What is different this October is the forecast itself. The expected-minus-base figure for the month is 289.5 billion, against 147.3 in July, 114.2 in August and 100.7 in September. The ministry is not reporting a better October. It is expecting one.
What the central bank actually does with it
The ministry announces the gross amount; the central bank executes it with a correction of its own. In a comment of 29 June the bank set out the rule for the second half of 2026: the daily volume is the ministry's announced figure adjusted for sales of 74.8 billion roubles, the net investment of fund money into permitted rouble assets in the first half year, “spread evenly over the second half of 2026 — 0.58 billion roubles a day”.
Applied to 12.7, that leaves roughly 12.1 billion roubles a day of actual buying. The bank publishes the adjusted figure when it announces the half-year rule rather than month by month, and we found no separate October statement from it; the subtraction is ours, by the method the bank itself states.
What this means for the series we track
We measure the liquid part of the NWF: $46.7 billion in August, scoring 29 of 100 against a pre-war anchor of $113.5 billion and a registered trouble line at $20 billion. Oil and gas revenue reads 0.561 — real rolling-twelve-month revenue as a share of the 2021 total — and scores 12, the second-lowest of the eight after overdue receivables.
Neither moves on this announcement, and the distinction matters enough to state plainly: 279.42 billion roubles is a planned flow for one month, not the balance of the fund and not the level of oil and gas revenue. Our readings come from different ministry files, on their own schedule. If October arrives as forecast, the fund's liquid part will be larger; if it does not, the correction appears in November's announcement as a negative number, exactly as September's did.
Our guide to the national wealth fund explains how the fund is filled and our guide to oil and gas revenue explains the base price the surplus is measured against. On 2 October we read the tabled bill that lets 2027 spending exceed the budget rule's own formula by 1,500 billion roubles, and on 1 October the central bank's own reason for the $50 base oil price proposed from 2027 — risks to the sufficiency of the fund's liquid part.
The strength index is 46.4 of 100, in the stress zone, with all eight indicators covered. This morning's run moved no reading.
What we do not know
What is inside the forecast. The ministry gives 289.46 billion as one number. It does not decompose it into price, volume, exchange rate or excise refunds, and the base monthly volume for October is still blank in the workbook.
The split between currency and gold. The announcement covers both in one figure and has never separated them.
Whether the September shortfall is fully carried. The reference line shows −59.7 billion against the −10.04 used. The footnote explains the smoothing rule; it does not state when the remainder lands or in what amount.
How we read it. The ministry's site refused our requests throughout this session, returning a notice that access had been restricted by the site's owner. The release and the workbook were read through an archive capture made of the live pages during this session, not from a retelling; every figure above is from those two files.