On the evening of 9 October Minfin published its preliminary estimate of federal budget execution for January–September. It is a routine monthly release with a fixed format, which is what makes it readable: put this month's beside last month's and the changes are the news. There are two. A clause about complying with the budget law is gone, replaced by a sentence saying the year required a deviation from the structural balance target. A row has also disappeared from the table — the one monthly public figure for how much of the state's spending reaches its contractors.
We read five of these releases in this session: January–September 2026, January–August, January–July, January–June, and January–September 2025 as the control.
The clause that is gone
Here is how the August release, published on 9 September, began:
“Execution of the federal budget during January–August 2026 was carried out in accordance with the target parameters approved in the budget law, taking into account the special provisions established by Federal Law No. 195-FZ of 26 June 2026.”
The same opening a month later keeps the law and drops the compliance:
“Execution of the federal budget during January–September 2026 is being carried out taking into account the special provisions established by Federal Law No. 195-FZ of 26 June 2026, ‘On amendments to the Budget Code of the Russian Federation and certain legislative acts of the Russian Federation’. The increase in spending to finance key priorities, together with the contraction of base oil and gas revenues, required some deviation from the target parameters of the structural balance. The deficit at the primary structural level this year is expected to be within −1.8% of GDP.”
The July and June releases open exactly as August does, word for word: executed “in accordance with the target parameters approved in the budget law”. In none of the three does the phrase “structural balance” appear at all.
One thing this is not, and the distinction matters. It is not the first time the ministry has published a structural figure, and the right control is not August but September a year ago — September is when the draft budget is tabled, so it is the month this paragraph belongs to. The January–September 2025 release carried both a number and an admission of overshoot:
“In 2025 as a whole the federal budget deficit is expected at a level of 2.6% of GDP, and the structural primary balance in the amount of 1.3% of GDP.”
“The overshoot of the target parameters of the structural primary balance by the year's end is connected with the slowdown in the growth of non-oil-and-gas revenues.”
So an overshoot was conceded last year too. What changed is the wording around it, and three things in particular. Last year's release still framed execution as being “in accordance with the target parameters of the structural deficit”; this year's says a deviation was required. Last year the cause was slowing revenue; this year it is spending, named first in the sentence. And last year's 1.3% carries no sign at all, while this year's −1.8% carries one — which is why 1.3 and 1.8 cannot be read as a single series, and we do not read them as one here.
What the same table now expects for the year
The September release carries a column the monthly ones do not: beside “approved by law No. 426-FZ of 28 November 2025” sits “estimate for the draft budget law for 2027–2029”. It is the first place the year's revision appears in the ministry's own figures.
| Line, ₽ bn | Jan–Sep 2026 | Approved, 426-FZ | New estimate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | 29,639 | 40,283 | 41,182 |
| of which base oil and gas | 5,306 | 8,957 | 6,961 |
| Spending | 34,825 | 44,070 | 48,527 |
| Deficit | −5,186 | −3,786 | −7,345 |
| Deficit, % of GDP | −2.2 | −1.6 | −3.2 |
Read across the bottom row: the deficit the budget law provides for is 3,786 bn roubles, and the deficit now expected is 7,345 bn — 3,559 bn more, very nearly double. Spending accounts for most of it, up 4,457 bn on the law, against 899 bn of extra revenue.
The table rounds, and it is worth saying where, because the arithmetic does not close to the last billion in two places. The two components above give 3,558 while the deficit line itself moves by 3,559. And the law's own column subtracts to −3,787 where the table prints −3,786. Both gaps are one billion roubles and result from the ministry's rounding of figures in the tens of thousands. We name them rather than silently picking whichever figure reads better.
The line that moves against the others is base oil and gas revenue: 8,957 bn in the law, 6,961 bn now — just under 2 trn roubles less. That is the “contraction of base oil and gas revenues” the deviation sentence names, in the ministry's own column. In nine months those revenues came to 5,306 bn, 17.2% below the same period of 2025, which the release attributes to a weaker average dollar exchange rate and to “growth in the damper component amid faster growth in world prices for oil products”. A month earlier the same explanation referred to the oil price in late 2025 and early 2026 as it feeds into the mineral extraction tax; the damper is new in this slot.
Against that, the release names a second source and caps it:
“The ceiling on federal budget spending may be raised this year within the limits of incoming additional non-oil-and-gas revenues, and also through the raising of other sources of deficit financing (in an amount of no more than 3 trn roubles).”
“Not resorting to additional OFZ borrowing”
The same paragraph that announces the wider structural deficit also says how it is not being paid for:
“At the same time, the expansion of the structural deficit this year is being financed primarily without resorting to additional borrowing on the OFZ market, with the aim of easing access to credit for sectors outside government and supporting stability in the financial markets.”
Eight days before that sentence, the same ministry published its auction schedule for the fourth quarter, and its indicative total for the quarter — 1,200 bn roubles in bonds maturing within ten years, 1,250 bn in longer ones, 2,450 bn together — carries a footnote attached to the table's own title:
“Taking account of the additional requirement for sources of financing the federal budget deficit in 2026.”
We read that schedule and that footnote yesterday, against a central bank figure of 1.4 trn left in the annual plan. The two documents are eight days and one claim apart: the quarter is sized for an additional financing requirement, and the monthly release says the expansion is being financed primarily without additional OFZ borrowing. Both are the finance ministry's own texts. Neither mentions the other.
The ministry's workbook of every 2026 auction, updated to 8 October, gives the year so far: 7,637.3 bn roubles of demand, 4,723.7 bn placed at face value, 4,202.7 bn of proceeds. Of those proceeds, 4,128.7 bn had been raised by 1 October and 74.0 bn came from the 7 October auction and the additional placement after it — the first of the quarter's eleven dates.
Set that against last year. At the budget committee of the State Duma on the same 9 October, finance minister Anton Siluanov presented the execution of the 2025 budget:
“The deficit for 2025 came to 5.6 trn roubles, or 2.6% of GDP. To cover it, state domestic borrowing was raised in the amount of 6.8 trn roubles. The volume of state debt came to 16.4% of GDP and is under control.”
Nine months of proceeds plus the quarter's indicative volume is about 6.58 trn. Against 6.8 trn of domestic borrowing in all of 2025, that is the same order of magnitude, not a smaller one. The comparison bounds rather than measures: auction proceeds include accrued coupon income, which under article 113 of the Budget Code is not counted towards the borrowing programme, and Siluanov's 6.8 trn is a borrowing total rather than a proceeds total. The bases differ by a few per cent of face value. They do not differ by enough to turn this year's programme into a visibly smaller one.
The deputy minister, the same afternoon
Ninety minutes before the release went up, first deputy finance minister Irina Okladnikova told the Duma's ecology committee what the 2027–2029 budget assumes: a federal deficit of 2.2% of GDP in 2027 and 1.9% in 2028 and 2029. On the rule itself:
“We are moving onto a path of compliance with the budget rule. This shows that the federal budget is balanced. Small adjustments were made to the rule this year, and they will continue to apply. In other words, we are no longer departing from the parameters of the budget rule.”
Read the two documents of that afternoon together and they are not in contradiction, which is the point. The release says the year required a deviation from the structural balance target. The deputy minister says there is no longer any departure from the rule, because the rule itself was adjusted this year and the adjustments stay. A target is only a constraint while it is fixed; a target that moves to where the spending went is a description. Our guide to the deficit sets out how the gap is measured and covered, and the 2027 bill we read on 2 October lets spending exceed the rule's own formula by 1,500 bn roubles in 2027 and 500 bn in 2028. The September release adds the year those overrides start from.
The row that stopped being published
In the table of the September release, the line “EXPENDITURE” — 34,825 bn, 14.5% above a year earlier — is followed immediately by “DEFICIT”. Between them, in every monthly release this year, stood a line called “state procurement”:
| Release | State procurement, ₽ bn | y/y | Annual plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| January–June 2026 | 7,553 | +47.4% | 10,279 |
| January–July 2026 | 8,440 | +39.2% | 10,279 |
| January–August 2026 | 8,996 | +36.2% | 10,279 |
| January–September 2026 | — | — | — |
The obvious objection is that September's release has a different shape from a mid-quarter one, since this is when the draft budget column appears. That objection does not hold. The January–September 2025 release has that same extra column and the row as well: 7,242 bn, 34.3% above the year before, against an annual plan of 8,541 bn. The format is the same; the row is not in it.
What that row measured has no public substitute at monthly frequency. Cash spending shows money moving inside the budget system; state procurement showed how much of it turned into paid contracts with suppliers — the money that actually reaches government contractors. It is the same channel the central bank watches from the other end, in incoming payments to industries working on state demand, which we read a day ago as 24.4% below a year earlier in September, and the same channel that shows up at the far end as unpaid bills between firms.
Three cautions are essential to the conclusion. One month is not a series: if the row returns in the November release this was a change of layout, and nothing more. The release carries no footnote and no explanation for the removal. And we could not check whether the series survives in the Federal Treasury's own monthly reporting, because roskazna.gov.ru has not answered from this environment for three weeks.
What we could not establish
Whether −1.8% is a revised target or a statement of outturn. The release does not say, and the target trajectory for the 2026 structural primary balance is not published in any source available to us. As recently as 1 September the central bank wrote in its draft monetary policy guidelines that the government's trajectory was “not yet determined” and substituted an assumption of its own, 2% of GDP for 2026.
What the 3 trn roubles of other sources are. The release caps the amount and does not break it down. Liquid reserves, balances on the single treasury account, privatisation or some combination are all consistent with the text, and we are not going to pick one. It is worth stating plainly that the sentence ruling out additional OFZ borrowing narrows the field, and that the liquid part of the National Wealth Fund is the largest candidate left standing in it — but the document does not say so, and we are not putting words in it.
Whether the procurement row stood in the January–May releases. We verified June, July and August directly and September 2025 as the control. The earlier 2026 releases we could not locate: the ministry's press-centre search returns only the September file, and guessing at identifiers risks citing the wrong document.
The National Defence outturn for 2025. Neither Siluanov nor Okladnikova named a figure, though health care got 28.6 trn roubles for 2027–2029 named the same day. The execution bill itself is out of reach: sozd.duma.gov.ru has been unreachable for three weeks.
What this means for the series we track
The federal deficit reads 3.2% of GDP over the rolling twelve months through September — 7,342 bn roubles — and scores 66 of 100 against a pre-war anchor that is a 2021 surplus of 0.34% of GDP, with the registered trouble line at a deficit of 10%. It improved this month, from 3.3%.
Two figures of 3.2% appear in this story and they are not the same number. Ours is a rolling twelve-month total divided by GDP. The ministry's “within 3.2% of GDP” is its expectation for the 2026 calendar year. They coincide this month by arithmetic accident; neither confirms the other.
Oil and gas revenue reads 0.561 — real rolling-twelve-month revenue as a share of the 2021 total — and scores 12 of 100, the second-lowest of the eight after overdue receivables. It did not move on this release. The 2 trn roubles cut from the base oil and gas revenue estimate is a forecast for the year, not revenue collected; our series measures the level actually received against 2021, which is why a revision to a plan leaves it where it was.
The consolidated balance of the regions improved to −1.466 trn roubles from −1.509 trn, on a reading taken today from the ministry's own monthly appendix. Nothing in the day's documents explains the move.
The strength index stands at 46.5 of 100, in the stress zone; all eight readings are on the monitor. Our guide to how Russia finances the war follows the chain from oil revenue to the reserve to the gap, which is the chain this release describes in three sentences and one missing row.