On 27 October Irkutsk oblast published law No. 81-OZ, signed by the governor on 26 October and in force the day after publication. It is 232 pages, scanned without a text layer; in this session we read the amending articles and the two restated annexes as images, together with the June amendment to the same budget. Article 1 replaces four figures in the budget law’s opening article:
“in the fourth paragraph the figures ‘25,831,600.3’, ‘10.5 %’ shall be replaced respectively by the figures ‘38,692,236.6’, ‘15.5 %’”
In thousands of roubles. Spending for 2026 goes from 310,476,704.4 to 327,240,994.8 — up 16,764,290.4. Revenue goes from 284,645,104.1 to 288,548,758.2 — up 3,903,654.1. The difference between those two increases is the deficit increase: 12,860,636.3, taking the deficit from 25,831,600.3 to 38,692,236.6 thousand roubles, a rise of 49.8% in one act. The law’s own share figure moves from 10.5% to 15.5%.
The centre’s contribution to the increase: 3.0 million
The same paragraph that raises revenue also raises its gratuitous-receipts component — the transfers from the federal budget — from 37,504,170.2 to 37,507,189.4. That is an increase of 3,019.2 thousand roubles: three million roubles, 0.08% of the 3,903,654.1 by which revenue rose. The remaining 3,900,634.9 is the oblast’s own money.
So the arithmetic of this amendment is: spending rises 16.8 billion, the centre supplies 3.0 million of the offset, the oblast finds 3.9 billion itself, and the other 12.9 billion is borrowed.
Where the 38.7 billion comes from
The law restates annex 20 — the sources financing the 2026 deficit — in full. Set out in thousands of roubles as the document gives them:
| source | 2026 |
|---|---|
| credits from credit institutions, net | 37,769,861.0 |
| budget credits from other budgets, net | −797,084.1 |
| change in cash balances | 759,708.2 |
| return of budget credits granted to local budgets | 959,751.5 |
| total | 38,692,236.6 |
The four lines sum to the total exactly. 37,769,861.0 of the 38,692,236.6 — 97.6% — is commercial bank credit, drawn at 192,069,861.0 against 154,300,000.0 repaid within the year.
The budget-credit line runs the other way: in 2026 Irkutsk repays 797,084.1 thousand roubles more to other budgets of the budget system than it receives. Most of the gross figures behind that line are a loop — of the 40,376,843.0 to be drawn, 40,000,000.0 are treasury credits for topping up the single budget account, and the same 40,000,000.0 stands in the repayment lines, money borrowed and returned inside the year. Strip the loop out and the centre’s lending to Irkutsk this year is 376,843.0 drawn against 1,173,927.1 repaid — the drawn part being infrastructure credit from temporarily free federal funds, the repaid part infrastructure credits, special treasury credits and the rest.
The maturity is capped at two years
Annex 19, the borrowing programme, is restated in the same act. Against the bank-credit block, in each of the three years it covers, it sets:
“Maximum maturities of debt obligations arising from borrowing in the corresponding financial year — up to 2 years”
That line dates the bill. Money borrowed in 2026 under this programme falls due by 2028 at the latest, and the programme already writes in what refinancing it will take: gross drawdowns of 131,673,607.1 in 2027 against 105,875,446.3 repaid, and 155,805,892.0 in 2028 against 131,673,607.1 repaid. Net new bank credit in those years is 25,798,160.8 and 24,132,284.9. The budget-credit line turns positive in 2027 (+2,505,748.9) and negative again in 2028 (−1,943,924.1), and in both planned years it carries a −980,083.9 entry for credits whose return is handled through the debt write-off mechanism.
The debt ceiling moves by exactly the deficit
Article 27 of the budget law sets the ceiling on the oblast’s state internal debt. The amendment moves its three figures by the same amount, to the rouble:
| ceiling at | before | after | change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Jan 2027 | 101,930,992.7 | 114,791,629.0 | +12,860,636.3 |
| 1 Jan 2028 | 130,234,902.4 | 143,095,538.7 | +12,860,636.3 |
| 1 Jan 2029 | 152,423,263.2 | 165,283,899.5 | +12,860,636.3 |
The increase is the deficit increase, applied unchanged to all three dates: the right to owe is enlarged by precisely the amount newly borrowed, and the enlargement is carried forward rather than worked off. The amending law states no headings for these paragraphs, but the identification is arithmetic rather than inference — the gaps between the three figures, 28,303,909.7 and 22,188,360.8, are exactly annex 19's own total borrowing line for 2027 and 2028, which is a net total.
Meanwhile, the centre is making it easier to hand regions more to maintain
One day earlier, on 26 October, the federal government published decree No. 1408, amending its 2024 rules on handing federal property free of charge to regions and municipalities. We read it against the 2024 edition it changes. It removes the interdepartmental approval stage in two directions. Real estate inside settlements now falls under that stage only where the settlement has “a population of more than 100 thousand people”, so transfers in smaller towns no longer need it. And the list of property needing no approval at all is restated to add bridges and overpasses, and:
“objects of energy which are not linear objects but are inseparably connected with them by purpose, including transformer substations and heating substations”
Aircraft, sea-going ships and inland-waterway vessels move in the same restatement from the conditional subparagraph — where they could be handed over only on the instruction of the president, the prime minister or the responsible deputy prime minister — into the unconditional one. The requirement that heritage objects be entered in the unified state register before qualifying has also gone from the text.
The decree names no sum, no object and no deadline, which is why it is a paragraph here rather than its own piece. Its connection to the Irkutsk law is the direction of travel: maintaining, repairing and insuring a bridge or a substation is paid by the budget that receives it, and the stage at which a receiving region or municipality could object has been removed.
What this means for the series we track
We measure the consolidated regional budget 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. This law moves none of it — no reading changed in this morning’s run, and the strength index stands at 46 of 100, in the stress zone.
What it adds is a fourth regional data point this month, and the one with the sharpest version of the pattern. Khanty-Mansi went to the bond market and the banks for 88.9 billion roubles on 9 October; Rostov raised its deficit for the third time this year, to 41.9 billion, with 95.7% of it bonds and bank credit on 14 October; Khakassia went on paying wages without a budget law in force. Irkutsk has the same signature as Rostov and Khanty-Mansi — commercial credit covering nearly all of the gap while the centre’s budget-credit line runs negative — and adds two details they did not carry: a two-year maturity cap written into the programme, and a federal contribution to the revenue increase of 0.08%.
That last figure is the one to hold against the support instruments built this autumn. The centre deferred 300 billion roubles of budget-credit repayments for regions that cannot pay, replaced the guarantees on equalisation grants with a 90% floor, and ended the accrual of interest on budget debts in court. None of that is money for a region that can still borrow. Irkutsk can, and did — at whatever the market charges, for up to two years.
What we do not know
What the 16.8 billion buys. The law restates annexes 5, 7, 9 and 11 and four tables of annex 14, which carry spending by department and programme; we did not read them, and article 1 states no totals by section. The oblast government’s portal, describing the draft in October, attributed 9.9 billion of the increase to public-sector pay — but that is an account of the bill rather than the law, and the items it lists sum to roughly 17.8 billion against the 16.8 billion actually enacted, so we have not used it.
What the borrowing costs. No interest rate appears anywhere in the act. What the oblast pays on 192 billion of drawdowns is not visible here, and the amendment does not touch any debt-service figure we could read.
How much of the bank credit is new. We could not obtain the previous edition of annex 20. It was restated by the June amendment, law No. 47-OZ, whose published scan is truncated: of 462 pages only 328 carry an image, and the final annexes are not among them. So we can say bank credit funds 97.6% of the deficit as it now stands, but not how much of the 12.9 billion increase is newly added bank credit rather than a reshuffle between sources.
The base under 15.5%. The figure is the law’s own. Measured against revenue less gratuitous receipts — 251,041,568.8 — the deficit is 15.4%, so the statutory base nets out something further, most likely revenue from additional deduction norms as the Budget Code allows. The amending law does not reproduce the wording of the paragraph it is editing, and we did not read the consolidated text of law No. 104-OZ.
What the other amended articles are. Article 1 also moves figures in articles 6, 7, 8 and 9 — among them a rise of 8,014,750.5 in the first paragraph of article 9. An amending law states no headings, and without the consolidated budget law we cannot say what those lines are, so we have not characterised them.