On 7 October Minfin sold one bond, and the notice it published names the price of money: a cut-off yield of 16.63% a year. By the ministry's own summary table of every auction of 2026, no fixed-coupon auction this year had gone above 16.44%. Three weeks earlier the same bond was sold at 16.31%. A week before the record, on 30 September, an auction was declared not to have taken place at all, “for want of bids at acceptable price levels”. And on 1 October the ministry published its auction schedule for the fourth quarter, whose indicative total is about a trillion roubles larger than what the central bank says is left of the annual plan — with a footnote that explains why. We read all four documents in this session.
What the day cost
The notice covers fixed-coupon issue No. 26252RMFS, maturing 12 October 2033 — just over seven years out. The offer was not a number but a residue: “the remainder available for placement in the said issue”. Translated:
“Results of the placement of issue No. 26252RMFS: — volume of offer – the remainder available for placement in the said issue; — volume of demand – 134.371 bn roubles; — placed volume of the issue – 39.129 bn roubles; — proceeds from the placement – 35.745 bn roubles; — cut-off price – 85.5620% of par; — yield at the cut-off price – 16.63% a year; — weighted average price – 85.5626% of par; — weighted average yield – 16.63% a year.”
After the auction the ministry sold more of the same issue at the auction's weighted average price. That notice offered 45.447 bn and placed 41.867 bn, for proceeds of 38.246 bn at the same 16.63%.
So the day has three sizes, and they are not interchangeable. It added 80.996 bn roubles of face value to the state's debt (39.129 plus 41.867). It brought in 73.991 bn of proceeds (35.745 plus 38.246). And proceeds include the coupon that has accrued since the last payment date, which the buyer advances and gets back: price times face value comes to 33.480 bn for the auction and 35.822 bn for the additional placement, so accrued interest is 5.79% of face value in both — the same proof, to the same decimal, that we ran on the 9 September auctions. Strip it out and the day raised 69.302 bn against the bonds themselves.
Which of the three matters depends on what is being counted, and the ministry's own schedule says — see below — that the plan counts the one without accrued interest.
16.31%, three weeks ago
The workbook of every 2026 auction, updated to 1 October, lets the price be read against the year. Issue 26252RMFS was sold on 16 September at a cut-off yield of 16.31% — twenty-one days and 32 basis points before 7 October, the same bond, the same maturity. The highest cut-off yield recorded on any fixed-coupon auction in the table is 16.44%, on 23 September, issue 26253RMFS. The 16.63% of 7 October is 19 basis points above that: the most the ministry has agreed to pay this year to borrow at a fixed coupon. Floating-coupon auctions carry no comparable figure — the table leaves their yield columns blank, because the rate is not fixed at sale.
A week before the record, the ministry chose not to pay. Its notice of 30 September is one sentence:
“The Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation announces that the auction for the placement of federal loan bonds with a constant coupon income of issue No. 26228RMFS on 30 September 2026 is declared not to have taken place, for want of bids at acceptable price levels.”
The workbook records what that looked like: 96.474 bn offered, 77.290 bn of demand, nothing placed. Seven days later the ministry accepted 16.63% and took almost the whole remaining stock of a different issue — 41.867 bn out of the 45.447 bn it had left to sell. That is the choice the mechanism offers, and our guide to OFZ describes it in the abstract: pay the price buyers demand, or do not borrow. In seven days Russia did both.
The quarter's target, and the footnote under it
The fourth-quarter schedule, published 1 October, lists eleven auction dates — 7, 14, 21 and 28 October, 11, 18 and 25 November, 2, 9, 16 and 23 December — and one short table of “indicative volume of funds to be raised from placing OFZ”: 1,200 bn roubles in bonds maturing within ten years and 1,250 bn in bonds maturing later. Two thousand four hundred and fifty billion for the quarter.
The central bank, in its September risk review published on 8 October, counts differently. It reports that in September the ministry placed 0.9 trn roubles of floating-coupon and 0.3 trn of fixed-coupon bonds, “fulfilling the quarterly borrowing plan by 84%”, and then: “Thus, to fulfil the annual plan it has left to place bonds for 1.4 trn roubles.” A note beside the same chart puts that at “106 bn roubles on average at each auction”.
The two figures are about a trillion roubles apart — 1,050 bn, to be exact about an estimate neither side rounds. The central bank's arithmetic fits the programme as originally written: the ministry's own table gives 4,128.694 bn of proceeds in the nine months to 1 October, and 4.13 plus 1.4 is about 5.53 trn for the year. The quarterly schedule is sized for something larger, and the schedule itself says what:
“Taking account of the additional requirement for sources of financing the federal budget deficit in 2026.”
That is footnote one, attached to the title of the table. Footnote two says how the volumes are measured: under article 113 of the Budget Code, accrued coupon income and any excess of the placement value over face value “are not counted towards the fulfilment of state borrowing programmes”. So the quarter's 2,450 bn is to be reached with the narrowest of the day's three numbers — the 69.302 bn kind, not the 80.996 bn kind. The central bank's 1.4 trn carries no such note, so the two figures are not strictly on the same basis — but accrued coupon is a few per cent of nominal, nowhere near the trillion between them.
Set the day against the quarter either way and the pace is the story. Eleven dates to raise 2,450 bn is about 223 bn a date; eleven dates to raise the central bank's 1,400 bn is about 127 bn a date. The first of the eleven produced 80.996 bn of face value, 73.991 bn of proceeds, 69.302 bn once accrued interest is stripped — and it did so by paying the highest yield of the year and selling almost all of what it had left to sell.
We could not establish which of the two the budget is now working to. The text of a revised 2026 borrowing programme would say, and we did not find one: sozd.duma.gov.ru has been unreachable from this environment for three weeks, and no such act appears in the pravo.gov.ru feed for the window. What exists in writing is the footnote, and the footnote says the quarter is planned around an additional need.
The second tier pays more
The same central bank review measures what the state's price does to everyone who borrows behind it. Spreads to OFZ narrowed for the strongest corporate names and blew out for the weaker ones:
“Spreads of yields of corporate bonds with high credit quality to OFZ narrowed, while those with ratings ‘A’ and ‘BBB’ widened substantially (by 180 and 407 bp respectively). The monthly growth of spreads in bonds with a ‘BBB’ rating was the largest in recent years.”
The widening, the bank adds, was concentrated in construction and leasing. At the top of the ladder, AAA and AA spreads narrowed by 37 to 38 basis points in the same month. Defaults on bonds and digital financial assets came to 6.5 bn roubles in September against 4.5 bn in August, with the main share in two companies the review does not name and part of it technical. The market itself grew: 624 bn roubles, 1.7%, to 38.0 trn, mostly financial-sector issuers, and retail investors bought 158 bn.
One number in the same review cuts against the simple reading, and it belongs here rather than in a footnote: the yield of the rouble corporate bond index RUCBTRNS rose 55 basis points over the month to 16.60%, while OFZ of comparable duration rose 66, so the index spread narrowed by 11 basis points, to 149. The squeeze is not the whole corporate market — it is the lower half of it, which is where contractors, developers and leasing companies sit.
What the central bank says moved the price
The review's own explanation of the September rise in yields is one sentence, and it names a budget rather than a market: yields rose across the whole curve, on average by 64 basis points, against “a substantial revision of planned expenditure, of the budget deficit, and an increase in the volumes of OFZ borrowing in the coming years”, together with rising household inflation expectations and the 11 September decision to hold the key rate at 14%. Ten-year OFZ yields, it says, reached multi-year highs.
That revision is one we read in the primary texts on 2 October: the 2027 budget bill lets spending exceed the budget rule's formula by 1,500 bn roubles in 2027 and 500 bn in 2028. The bills are for future years; the price is being paid now. This is the ordinary mechanism of a bond market, and it is also the point: a deficit widened on paper this autumn arrives as a yield at an auction this month.
What we could not establish
The current annual borrowing programme. The gap between 2,450 bn and 1,400 bn has only one published explanation — the schedule's footnote. Whether the programme was formally raised, and by how much, needs the amended text, which we could not reach.
How much of the quarter is meant to be floaters. September's 1.2 trn was 0.9 trn of floating-coupon bonds; 7 October was pure fixed coupon. The schedule splits its 2,450 bn by maturity only, never by coupon type, so the mix is not in the document.
Who defaulted. The review gives 6.5 bn roubles and “two companies”, without names, and does not say how much of the sum was technical.
How the construction and leasing spreads split. The 407 basis points is one figure for the whole BBB rating band; the review names the two industries driving it and gives no separate numbers for either.
What this means for the series we track
OFZ placement was retired as an indicator on 22 August: how the deficit is financed is not the same question as whether the state can pay, and when auctions fail the bill lands on reserves we measure directly. The two readings this auction speaks to are therefore the reserve and the gap.
Liquid NWF stands at $46.7 bn at the end of August, scoring 29 of 100 against its pre-war anchor of $113.5 bn on 1 February 2022 and a registered trouble line at $20 bn. The federal deficit runs at 3.3% of GDP over the rolling twelve months through August — 7,501 bn roubles — scoring 65 of 100 against the 2021 surplus of 0.34% of GDP and a registered trouble line at 10%. Neither reading moved this morning: today's run found no change in any of the eight series.
What moved is the price of the channel between them. The liquid fund is the only source of deficit financing that needs nobody's agreement; the bond market is the one that does, and on 7 October it agreed at 16.63%. The strength index is 46.2 of 100, in the stress zone.