On 23 October the official portal published ruling No. 61-P of 22 October, forty-seven pages from the Constitutional Court, answering a request from the government of Amur oblast. We read the scan this session. It settles a narrow question with a wide consequence: when a Russian region is late compensating a utility for the tariff gap it created itself, it no longer owes interest for the delay.
The operative paragraph is the third:
“Until such time as changes arising from the present Ruling are introduced into the current legal regulation, where a court recovers from a public-law entity losses in favour of a resource-supplying organisation that arose as a consequence of the exercise of state powers of tariff regulation and were caused by untimely performance of the obligation to compensate the inter-tariff difference, the interest provided for by article 395 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation shall not accrue.”
The ruling is final, not subject to appeal, and took effect on the day of publication.
What the interest was for
The inter-tariff difference is the gap a region creates itself. A regional tariff authority sets the price a household pays for heat below the economically justified level; the supplier delivers at the lower price and is owed the difference from the budget. The Court restated its own 2011 position that this obligation to compensate is a direct consequence of exercising the power to regulate prices.
Article 395 of the Civil Code charges interest on money wrongfully withheld, and it fixes the rate at the Bank of Russia key rate for the period. On 23 October — the day this ruling was published — the CBR board held the key rate at 14.00% per annum. That is what a region’s delay has been costing, and that is what has now been removed.
The case behind it
Amur oblast went to the Constitutional Court after losing repeatedly in the commercial courts. The request came with copies of judgments showing, in the Court’s words, repeated imposition of article 395 liability on the region for late reimbursement of a supplier’s forgone revenue on heat sold to households at a preferential tariff.
The case the region put at the centre, No. A04-5616/2024, is small enough to set out in full. A municipality was obliged under a subsidy agreement to transfer 3,886,986.96 roubles by 11 January 2023. It transferred 3,785,954.59. The shortfall — 101,032.37 roubles — ran until 31 January 2024, when the oblast satisfied a writ the supplier had lodged with the regional finance ministry on 22 January. The commercial court of Amur oblast awarded interest on 10 September 2024, the Sixth Appellate Court upheld it on 28 November 2024, the Far Eastern District Court on 13 March 2025, and a Supreme Court judge refused a further appeal on 16 July 2025.
Two details of that case are worth keeping in mind. The creditor was a federal state budget institution — in the dispute that produced this ruling, the “utility” whose money the region was holding was itself part of the state. And since 1 January 2013 Amur oblast has delegated the compensation duty to its municipalities for an unlimited term, yet the claim was brought, and paid, against the region’s treasury.
The Court also set out how inconsistent the practice had become, naming the cases on both sides: in A04-4908/2023 and A04-5616/2024 the commercial courts ran interest from the expiry of the payment deadline in the municipal agreement, while in A04-6209/2020, A04-6210/2020 and A04-588/2022 they ran it from the expiry of the pre-trial claim period. That is five disputes from one region over five years, which is the only measure of frequency the document offers.
The argument the Court made against itself
The ruling is not a one-sided document, and the strongest passage in it runs the other way. Setting out what would happen if the budget-execution rules were allowed to interrupt the period of delay, the Court wrote:
“In such cases a public-law entity which has evaded voluntary performance of a monetary obligation to the creditor that arose objectively — in particular, on the basis of a normative act — and which by its inaction has prompted the creditor to go to court, would temporarily cease to be considered in default on the obligation because of the creditor’s forced exercise of its right to judicial protection. Meanwhile, under the current system of civil-law regulation, a reduction in the extent of a debtor’s liability for breach of an obligation, motivated by good-faith actions of the creditor directed at protecting its violated right, is not permitted.”
Having written that, the Court declined to choose. It held article 395, read together with clauses 1 and 2 of article 242-1 and clauses 3 and 6 of article 242-2 of the Budget Code, unconstitutional for uncertainty — because the law leaves unresolved whether such interest accrues at all, and if it does, for which periods. It instructed the federal legislator to remove that uncertainty and said both approaches “are not devoid of reasonable constitutional and sectoral legal grounds”.
So the finding is that the law does not say. The interim rule, which the Court was free to set either way while the legislator decides, is that nothing accrues. That choice is the news, not the finding of uncertainty.
Where the cost goes
Nothing in this makes a cost disappear. The money a region has not yet paid its supplier stays owed; what has gone is the charge for holding it. On the supplier’s books the sum sits where it sat — as a claim on a budget that is past due.
That is the series we track as overdue receivables. Rosstat’s operative figure for the end of July 2026 is 9,090.1 billion roubles overdue, out of 137,801.8 billion of total receivables. The ruling moves no figure in it: the Court awarded nothing, cancelled nothing and gave no sum. What it changes is the incentive on one class of debtor, and the direction is not in the creditor’s favour.
The region sets the price of its own delay
The paragraph immediately after the ban hands the question to the debtor:
“The state authorities of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation, when determining the rules for compensating resource-supplying organisations for the inter-tariff difference, are empowered to provide for an increase, at the expense of the budgets of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation, in the amounts of the corresponding payments in the event of delay in making them.”
A region may, if it wishes, write into its own compensation rules an uplift for paying late. The price of a regional budget’s delay was a federal statute and the central bank’s key rate; it is now an option available to the body that would pay it. The Court adds that the regions resolving this may also decide the periods for which such an uplift applies.
What this means for the series we track
The consolidated regional balance is a deficit of 1.466 trillion roubles over the rolling year, scoring 33 of 100 against the 2021 surplus of 0.661 trillion and a registered trouble line at a 2.5 trillion deficit. This ruling does not move it, and would not even if the sums were known: as our guide explains, the balance is a flow of revenue and spending, and interest a region no longer pays is a cost avoided, not revenue earned.
Overdue receivables remain the weakest reading we carry: 9,090.1 billion roubles is 1.96 times the January 2022 level in real terms, scoring 4 of 100 against the pre-war anchor of 1× and a registered trouble line at 2×. What overdue receivables are — and why the series is read in real terms rather than as a nominal total — is set out in the guide.
The strength index is 46 of 100, in the stress zone. This morning’s run moved no reading: the parser reported zero indicator changes.
Set beside the rest of the week, the ruling is one of three decisions in four days to remove a financial consequence rather than to fund anything. On 23 October the government released Krasnoyarsk krai and Chelyabinsk oblast from liability measures on their treasury infrastructure credits, naming no sum. On 20 October Crimea’s own debt policy booked written-off federal loans against war spending already made. Different instruments, one pattern: an obligation that was priced stops being priced.
What we do not know
The scale. The ruling carries no figure for the accumulated inter-tariff difference nationally, no count of such disputes, and no estimate of what regions have paid in article 395 interest in past years. The five Amur cases named in the text are the whole of the evidence on frequency.
Whether it reaches judgments already made. The ban is written for recoveries “by a court” still to come, and the ruling contains no transitional provision for awards already handed down but not yet paid.
What indexation leaves. The Court states expressly that it does not address whether interest and the indexation of awarded sums under article 183 of the Commercial Procedure Code can apply at the same time. Indexation therefore survives this ruling, but how much of a creditor’s loss it offsets is not something the document answers.
When the law catches up. The federal legislator has been instructed to resolve the uncertainty and given no deadline. Until it does, the interim rule is the rule.
The rest of the file. We read the ruling from the published scan — pages 1 to 9 and 25 to 47 in full, pages 10 to 24 not read. The Constitutional Court’s own site and its document server did not respond from this environment, the case file for A04-5616/2024 in the commercial-court registry was not opened, and the earlier rulings cited in the text — No. 2-P of 2011, No. 34-P of 2023, No. 3-P of 2024 and No. 25-P of 2026 — were not read.