On 19 October Vladimir Putin signed three laws closing the 2025 accounts of the three largest budgets in Russia: the federal budget, No. 340-FZ; the Pension and Social Insurance Fund, No. 341-FZ; and the Federal Compulsory Medical Insurance Fund, No. 342-FZ. All three were adopted by the State Duma on 13 October, approved by the Federation Council on 14 October, and published the day they were signed. They are scans with no text layer; we read article 1 of each, and the comparable article of each predecessor law, and recomputed every total.
These are not fresh monthly statistics. They are the documents that make a year legally final, and they are the only place where the three budgets can be set against one another on the same reported basis.
“Approve the report on the execution of the federal budget for 2025 as to revenues in the amount of 37,283,772,222.8 thousand roubles, as to expenditures in the amount of 42,910,312,400.2 thousand roubles, with an excess of expenditures over revenues (federal budget deficit) in the amount of 5,626,540,177.4 thousand roubles”.
The subtraction closes exactly. Against the 2024 law, No. 220-FZ of 23 July 2025, which reported 36,708,608,954.2 / 40,180,501,752.7 / 3,471,892,798.5, the year moved like this: revenues up 1.57%, expenditures up 6.79%, and the deficit up 62.06% — an extra 2,154,647,378.9 thousand roubles, or 2.15 trillion. These are nominal rates against the previous year, not levels, and we have applied no deflator. The law states no figure for GDP, so it does not say what share of output the deficit was, and we are not going to supply one.
The other half of the same day
Read alone, the federal number flatters the year. On the same day the government also reported that the Pension and Social Insurance Fund — the body that pays Russia’s pensions, sick pay and maternity benefit — had gone from surplus into deficit.
“3) the volume of the deficit of the budget of the Fund in the amount of 1,239,486,546.4 thousand roubles”.
The 2024 law, No. 222-FZ, reported the same line as “the volume of the surplus of the budget of the Fund in the amount of 554,925,146.3 thousand roubles”. That is a swing of 1,794,411,692.7 thousand roubles in one year, and the cause is named two sentences earlier in each law. Inter-budget transfers received from the federal budget were 3,186,264,330.1 thousand roubles in 2025 against 5,479,738,028.7 in 2024: a cut of 2,293,473,698.6, or 41.9%.
The Fund did not have a bad year collecting money. Subtracting all three transfer streams it reports — federal, regional and from the medical insurance fund — from its total revenues, its own contribution income rose from 10,836,262,543.4 to 12,602,353,100.8 thousand roubles, up 16.3%. That is our arithmetic from the figures in the two laws, not a line either document prints. Its headline revenues still fell 2.81%, because the transfer cut was larger than the contribution growth, while its spending rose 8.12%.
Where the reversal lands is the part worth reading twice. Both laws break the balance down, and the block called “transferred powers” — the benefits the Fund administers on the federal government’s behalf, and the ones the federal transfer pays for — went from a surplus of 410,784,538.2 thousand roubles to a deficit of 900,576,473.2. That single block accounts for 73% of the Fund’s entire swing. Pension insurance proper widened from a 147,400,151.7 deficit to 663,512,875.0. The two insurance branches that run on their own contributions and receive no federal transfer — sickness and maternity, and workplace injury — both improved, to surpluses of 177,693,236.0 and 165,303,411.1. The fifth component, the funded-pension part, is much the smallest: a surplus of 28,904,004.6 turning into a deficit of 18,393,845.3. The five components sum to the total swing to the hundred roubles, the smallest unit the laws state.
The third law is small enough to serve as a check on the other two. The medical insurance fund ran a surplus of 80,738,718.5 thousand roubles, and the 213,766,969.7 it reports transferring to the Social Fund is the identical figure the Social Fund reports receiving from it.
Taken together
Setting the federal balance beside the Fund’s:
| 2024 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|
| Federal budget | −3,471,892,798.5 | −5,626,540,177.4 |
| Social Fund | +554,925,146.3 | −1,239,486,546.4 |
| Combined | −2,916,967,652.2 | −6,866,026,723.8 |
In thousands of roubles. The combined gap is 2.35 times the 2024 one — worse by 3.95 trillion roubles, against the 2.15 trillion the federal line alone shows. Neither number is the “real” deficit and we are not proposing a new one: the two budgets are separate legal entities with separate laws, and the Fund has always received a federal transfer. What the pair shows is that a reader who follows only the federal figure is reading a balance from which 2.29 trillion roubles of obligation was moved during the year it covers.
How the deficit was paid for
Appendix 6, the financing sources, is the one appendix published in full. Within Minfin’s block, gross issuance of rouble-denominated state securities was 6,806,273,654.6 thousand roubles against redemptions of 1,414,666,933.9 — net new bond debt of 5,391,606,720.7, or 95.8% of the deficit. External financing was negative, at −189,088,540.2: Russia repaid more foreign-currency debt than it raised. Proceeds from selling shares in federal ownership came to 2,598,832.9 thousand roubles — 2.6 billion roubles, a rounding error against a 5.6 trillion gap.
What we will not tell you from this appendix is what the National Wealth Fund did. The cash movements of the NWF are not in Minfin’s block at all; they sit under the Federal Treasury, where an increase in NWF cash balances of 6,348,601,266.5 thousand roubles stands against a decrease of 6,073,483,832.6, with further movements on NWF deposits, and the Treasury’s whole block nets to +581,028,176.7. Those are trillions moving in both directions. Stating what the fund contributed on net would mean reading the whole of an appendix some forty scanned pages long, which we did not do.
What is secret, and what is merely old
The breakdown of federal spending by section and subsection — the one place where the line “National defence” appears — is not published. Article 1 sends it to “appendix 5 (secret)”, and the departmental breakdown to appendices 3 (“secret”) and 4 (“top secret”), with only appendix 2 open.
It would be easy, and wrong, to report that as news. We checked the 2024 law: its appendix construction is identical, down to the same numbering and the same classification on each. Nothing was closed this year that was open last year.
The date is not the story either
The law arrived on 19 October. The four before it were signed on 23 July 2025, 8 July 2024, 24 July 2023 and 14 July 2022 — which makes this year look roughly three months late. Pulled back further, the register says the opposite. The law closing 2019 was signed on 15 October 2020, the one closing 2020 on 25 October 2021, and before that: 16 October 2019, 11 October 2018, 16 October 2017, 31 October 2016, 5 October 2015, 4 October 2014, 30 September 2013, 2 October 2012.
For the ten years to 2021 this law was signed between 30 September and 31 October, without exception. July is the anomaly, and it lasted exactly four years — 2022 through 2025. A 19 October signing is a return to the pre-war calendar, not a departure from it. Why the government reported early in those four years, and why it has stopped, is not something these documents answer, and we make no claim about it.
Why this is about the ability to pay for the war
The year closed with a deficit 62% larger than the year before, financed almost entirely by issuing rouble bonds — net new bond debt covering 95.8% of the gap, with privatisation raising 2.6 billion roubles and foreign markets supplying nothing at all. That is a state funding itself from the only lender it has left, its own domestic market.
Underneath it is the sentence the three laws make legible only when read together. The federal budget reduced what it sent the pension and social insurance system by 2.29 trillion roubles in a single year, and the obligations that money pays for did not shrink with it — they came in 900 billion roubles short inside the Fund instead. A capital project can lose its money mid-year, a failed state task can be reclassified, a spending line can sit in a secret appendix. A pension falls due on a date. In 2025 it was met by taking the shortfall onto the Fund’s own balance.
What this changes in our model
Nothing, and that is by design. Our budget deficit series tracks the rolling twelve-month federal balance as a share of GDP, taken from Minfin’s monthly execution data; this law reports a final annual rouble total for a year already inside that series. The number is not handed to the parser, and the indicator stands where it stood: 66 of 100, a rolling twelve-month deficit through September of 7,342 billion roubles, or 3.2% of GDP, measured against a pre-war anchor of the 2021 surplus of 524.3 billion roubles — 0.34% of GDP — and a registered trouble line at 10% of GDP. The strength index stands at 46 of 100, in the stress zone. No reading moved in today’s data update; all eight are on the monitor.
What the law does change is the standing of a number. Until 19 October, 2025 was a year described by operational monthly statistics. It is now a year with a legally approved figure attached, and that figure can no longer be revised quietly.
We keep finding obligations moved rather than met: the write-off of regional budget-loan debt in return for war-industry spending, treasury credit opened to every region, failed state tasks reclassified as emergencies, the budget rule overridden by 1.5 trillion roubles, and the defence reserve paying police benefit debts. Yesterday it was one republic re-cutting its budget without amending the budget law. Today the same move appears at the top of the system, and for once with a signed annual total attached to it. How we measure the deficit and how the war is financed are set out in the guides.
What we do not know
What the deficit was as a share of GDP. The law contains no GDP figure. Our own series puts the rolling twelve-month deficit through September 2026 at 3.2% of GDP, but that is a different measure over a different window and is not a comparison with this annual total.
What the National Wealth Fund contributed. As above: the NWF cash and deposit lines sit under the Federal Treasury, they move in trillions in both directions, and we read Minfin’s block, the Treasury’s opening pages and the external-financing block, not the whole of appendix 6. Anyone who tells you 2025 was or was not financed out of reserves has either read all forty pages or is guessing.
What the money was spent on. The section-and-subsection breakdown is in secret appendix 5 and the departmental detail in appendices 3 and 4. The open appendix 2 runs to a large part of the law’s 3,293 scanned pages and we have not worked through it, so we cannot say what any individual ministry spent.
Whether the Fund’s reversal was planned. We have not read the 2025 law on the Fund’s own budget or its in-year amendments, so we cannot say whether a 1.24 trillion deficit was what the Fund was authorised to run or a departure from it. That distinction matters and we do not have it.
How the Fund covered the gap. Article 2 sends the financing sources to an appendix we did not read, and the balance of the Fund’s own funds at 1 January 2026 does not appear in the part of the law we worked through.
Why the transfer was cut by 41.9%. The law states the amount, not the decision behind it. How much of the fall is a policy choice and how much is the effect of changes to how unified-tariff contributions are credited — a mechanism that was being altered during 2025 — is not something these documents distinguish.
Why the reporting calendar moved, twice. The dates above are from the legal register and are not in dispute. The reason the law came in July for four years and in October before and after them is not in the laws themselves, and we did not obtain the current text of the Budget Code provisions that set the deadline.