On 10 October the Sverdlovsk region published decree No. 449-УГ of 6 October, signed by governor D. V. Pasler, approving the main directions of the region's budget and tax policy for 2027 and the planning period 2028–2029. It is the document a region writes before it drafts its budget: the instructions its own finance ministry will work to.
We read all 24 pages of the scan in this session. There is not a single rouble figure in it — no budget parameters, no debt policy, which Sverdlovsk approves by a separate act. On its own the text reads like every such decree: priorities, national goals, sectoral lists.
What matters is what changed. These decrees are rewritten annually from the previous year's text, so the only way to read one is beside its predecessor — decree No. 386-УГ of 3 October 2025, 22 pages, the directions for 2026–2028. That document was unreachable through the region's own portals; we retrieved it from the federal publication register's API and read it the same way. Side by side, the texts show three changes, two of them involving the same term.
The region drops its pledge to prevent unpaid bills
Overdue payables — просроченная кредиторская задолженность, a budget's own unpaid bills to its suppliers and contractors — appear in both decrees in two places. In both places the 2026 text is weaker.
In the section listing the tasks of budget policy, last year's first task read:
“timely decisions on the prioritisation of spending in order to ensure balanced budget execution under external sanctions pressure, including in order to prevent the risks of overdue payables arising”
This year the same first task reads:
“prioritisation of existing spending obligations, rational and effective use of available budget funds, reduction of the risk of overdue payables arising”
Preventing the risk became reducing the risk. The sanctions framing went, and the object narrowed: prioritisation now applies to obligations the region already carries.
The second change is sharper because it turns the instruction into a concrete action. Last year, the article on public administration ended with this:
“prevention of the arising of overdue payables of the state authorities of the Sverdlovsk region, state institutions of the Sverdlovsk region and recipients of regional budget funds.”
In the new decree that line is replaced by:
“continuous monitoring of the overdue payables of the state authorities of the Sverdlovsk region, state institutions of the Sverdlovsk region and recipients of regional budget funds, and timely measures to eliminate them in order to maintain the financial stability of the budget system of the Sverdlovsk region.”
The list of who is covered is identical, word for word. The instruction itself has changed in kind. “Prevention of the arising” describes a state with no arrears in it. “Continuous monitoring” and “timely measures to eliminate them” describe a quantity that exists, is tracked, and is worked down. Monitoring alone could continue even at zero. The other half cannot: measures to eliminate arrears presuppose arrears to eliminate.
What was deleted from the chapter on municipalities
The second change is a deletion, and it is larger.
Last year's chapter on relations with municipal budgets had a second point, which read:
“financial support from the regional budget for: measures of infrastructure development of municipalities under agreements with the largest taxpayers and programmes for the development of anchor settlements; the discharge of municipalities' budget obligations in the form of budget lending and the restructuring of credit obligations with their partial write-off, to resolve tasks of social and economic significance”
That point does not appear in the 2026 decree. Budget lending to municipalities, restructuring with partial write-off, infrastructure support under taxpayer agreements — none of it is in the chapter, and none of it is anywhere else in the 24 pages.
One line above it, a promise was replaced rather than deleted. Where the 2025 text included, among the things a sufficient local budget must take account of,
“preservation of the volumes of local budgets' revenue sources, taking into account receipts under unified, additional and differentiated rates of tax revenue sharing”
the 2026 text puts
“an increase in the share of non-tax revenue receipts of local budgets”
The first is the region undertaking not to shrink what it shares downward. The second is an instruction to the towns to find more of their own.
What remains is supervision. The chapter's four remaining points cover equalisation, control over the obligations of grant-receiving municipalities, and this:
“control over the timely discharge of socially significant obligations and over compliance with the solvency criteria of municipalities, taking into account the degree to which the budget effect of financial-recovery plans for municipal finances has been achieved — plans aimed at mobilising revenue potential, optimising expenditure and reducing the budget deficit”
Solvency criteria and recovery plans were in last year's text too, inside the point on budget discipline. What is new is their weight: equalisation apart, every remaining point of the chapter is a form of control. The region's discretionary funding — loans, restructuring, infrastructure — left the chapter; the supervision stayed.
What did not change, and why that matters
Both decrees contain, in nearly identical words, the austerity phrasing that is easiest to mistake for news: the instruction to “limit decisions that give rise to new spending obligations… for measures that are not priorities”, and the undertaking to prevent any increase in the headcount of the region's civil servants. Those two sentences also appear in the 2025 text. They are the template, not the signal, and we say so because our own brief had flagged them as the finding.
One administrative line did move. Last year the region proposed to cut the cost of its own apparatus by centralising IT, information security and accounting. This year the stated instrument is:
“optimisation of spending on public administration through optimisation of the headcount of the region's civil servants and of employees in posts that are not civil-service posts”
Not hiring more, which was last year's promise and remains this year's, is a freeze. Acting on the headcount itself is a different instrument — though the decree says optimisation, not reduction, and we leave the word where it found it.
What this means for the series we track
We measure the consolidated regional balance as a rolling twelve-month total for all of Russia's regions together. It stands at a deficit of 1.466 trillion roubles, scoring 33 of 100 against a pre-war anchor of a 0.661 trillion surplus at the end of 2021 and a registered trouble line at a 2.5 trillion deficit. Our guide to regional budgets explains how the series is built. Nothing in this decree moves that number, and this morning's run moved none of the eight: the strength index is 46.5 of 100, in the stress zone.
What the decree adds is a view from inside one region of the same shift we have been following from the federal end. In the past three weeks the centre has deferred 300 billion roubles of regional budget-credit repayments from 2027–2029 to beyond 2030, suspended the indexation and no-cut guarantees on equalisation grants in favour of a floor of 90%, and written off 2.81 billion of Belgorod's budget-credit debt by the amount the region had directed to payments for war participants. Each changes the flow of money between the federation and the regions: two by easing what the regions owe the centre, one by lowering what the centre guarantees them. This is a region, drafting the inputs for the first budget year affected, adjusting its financial relationship with its towns — and writing down that it now expects unpaid bills to be a quantity it manages rather than one it prevents.
What we do not know
Whether anything stops. These are directions, not appropriations. Deleting budget lending to municipalities from a list of policy directions does not cancel a loan or repeal the law that permits one. What it removes is the region's written undertaking to do it, in the document that frames the budget about to be drafted.
How much is owed now. The decree names no sum, and the region's own finance portal, minfin.midural.ru, has not been reachable from our environment. We have no figure for Sverdlovsk's overdue payables on either date, so we cannot say whether the wording follows a number that has already moved.
Whether this is one region or many. Every region writes a decree like this each autumn. We have compared Sverdlovsk's two. We have not read anyone else's, and a single region's redraft establishes nothing about the rest.
What the 2027 budget actually does. The budget bill itself is a separate document, not yet published. The directions are not appropriations and move no money of their own; they state what the region instructs itself before the drafting starts.