On 30 October Minfin published order No. 134n of 8 September, registered with the Ministry of Justice the same day under No. 88962. It repeals instruction No. 191n of 28 December 2010 — the document governing how annual, quarterly and monthly reporting on the execution of budgets across Russia’s budget system is compiled and submitted — together with every amendment made to it in fifteen years. The order runs to eight pages and we read all of them in this session.
It takes effect on 1 January 2028.
What it cancels
Clause 1 is a list. It opens with the instruction itself, registered on 3 February 2011 under No. 19693:
“To declare invalid: order of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation of 28 December 2010 No. 191n ‘On approval of the Instruction on the procedure for compiling and submitting annual, quarterly and monthly reporting on the execution of budgets of the budget system of the Russian Federation’…”
Then it names the amendments, one at a time, each with its date, number and registration. Counted against the eight pages: twenty-eight amending acts — twenty-seven orders in full, plus clause 3 of one more, order No. 209n of 16 November 2016 — with registration numbers running from 23229 to 86036. The most recent, order No. 29n of 17 March 2026, was registered on 14 April this year — the ministry was still amending this instruction in the same year it repealed it.
Clause 2 is a single sentence:
“This order shall enter into force on 1 January 2028.”
It is signed by Anton Siluanov as Minister of Finance. The order is dated 8 September, about six weeks before the post was made a deputy prime ministership.
The twin repeal, and the difference between them
The same day, under the adjacent publication number, the ministry published order No. 133n — also dated 8 September, also signed by the minister, registered under No. 88963. It does the same thing to instruction No. 33n of 25 March 2011, the equivalent instruction for the accounting reports of state and municipal budgetary and autonomous institutions, and from the same date: 1 January 2028. We read it in full as well.
For that one, the replacement already exists. Two days earlier, on 28 October, the ministry published order No. 130n of 1 September, registered 27 October under No. 88912, approving new forms of annual, quarterly and monthly accounting reporting for those same institutions. Its clauses 2 and 3:
“This order shall be applied in compiling accounting (financial) reporting, starting with the accounting (financial) reporting for 2027.”
“This order shall enter into force on 1 January 2028.”
Old instruction repealed, new forms approved, both switching on the same day. That is a complete pair, and it also explains order No. 130n, which had appeared two days earlier without the repeal that makes sense of it.
For instruction No. 191n there is no such pair. The repeal names no successor, and we could find no order approving forms of reporting on budget execution.
A missing document is a claim, so we checked it
Absence is harder to establish than presence. Using the official portal’s own register, we listed every act Minfin published on publication.pravo.gov.ru in 2025 and 2026 — 290 of them, 133 of those in 2026 — and read the titles in this session. Exactly one approves reporting forms: No. 130n, the institutions’ one above. None approves forms, or an instruction, for reporting on the execution of budgets. None mentions the report forms by their codes.
What does exist is the framework above both instructions. On 29 November 2024 the ministry approved a pair of federal accounting standards for public finances, registered together on 7 March 2025: No. 179n, “Budget reporting”, registration No. 81474, and its counterpart for institutions, No. 180n, registration No. 81476. We read the first page of 179n: clause 1 approves the standard, and clause 2 puts it in force from 1 January 2027 — a year before either repeal takes effect.
So both halves of this reform have a standard, and both have a repeal date. Only one half has its forms.
What it means for the numbers we read
This is the reporting our own series are drawn from. The ministry’s monthly publication of federal budget execution is the source behind the federal deficit, which stands at 3.2% of GDP on a rolling twelve months — 7.34 trillion roubles — and scores 66 of 100 against a pre-war anchor that is itself a surplus, 0.34% of GDP in 2021, and a registered trouble line at 10%. The consolidated reporting of the regions is the source behind the regional balance, a deficit of 1.466 trillion roubles scoring 33 of 100 against a 0.661 trillion surplus at the end of 2021 and a trouble line at a 2.5 trillion deficit. Oil and gas revenue, which scores 10 of 100, comes out of the same monthly federal file.
Nothing here moves any of that. No reading changed in this morning’s run, the strength index stands at 46 of 100 in the stress zone, and the repeal is dated more than a year away.
It is also worth saying what this is not. It is not a data closure. We have reported those when they happened — the decree restricting oil export and refining data in September removed figures that had been published and barred their republication. Procedurally this order does the opposite: it is a scheduled replacement, of the kind that normally arrives with its replacement attached, as its twin did two days earlier.
What is open is narrower, and it is about comparability rather than availability. A monthly series is only a series while the thing being counted holds still. When the document that defines the composition of those reports is cancelled with effect from a named date, and we can find no published document defining them afterwards, there is no way to tell yet whether the figures either side of 1 January 2028 will be the same figures. They may well be. The ministry will have a standard in force from 2027 to build them on, and for the institutions’ half it published forms two days before the repeal. But the question is open on the public record, and the answer is not in any document available today. Our guide to the deficit and our guide to regional budgets describe how those publications are read now; both remain accurate, and we reviewed both today without changing them.
The sixth day with the ministry’s site down
There is an awkward coincidence in the timing. Our own monitor ran this morning against minfin.gov.ru and got HTTP 503 for the federal budget statistics page and for the national wealth fund statistics page; the consolidated regional budgets document page was unreachable too. Four of our eight indicators could not be refreshed from the ministry today, and by the researcher’s count it is the sixth consecutive day. Rosstat, the Treasury, government.ru and both Duma systems were also unreachable.
So on the day the ministry repealed the instruction behind its budget reporting, we could not read a word of explanation from the ministry itself, because the site that publishes the reports did not answer. The order reached us through the legal publication portal, which is the only federal source that has stayed up.
What we do not know
What replaces it. The order names no successor, and we found none published. Whether a draft forms order exists on regulation.gov.ru we did not check — that portal was outside this session’s window — and the ministry’s own explanatory materials were unreachable.
What is actually inside instruction No. 191n. We read the repeal, not the instruction. Which specific report forms it prescribes, and therefore which lines of the monthly publication would be affected, is not something this session verified from a primary document; we have described the instruction by the subject its own title gives it.
What the standard says about forms. We could read only the first page of the 88-page order approving standard No. 179n — the portal’s file endpoint returns the first page for that document and we could not retrieve the rest. Whether the standard itself prescribes the composition of the reports, leaves it to a separate forms order, or does both, we have not read and do not assert.
Whether the two repeals are one decision. They share a date, a signature and an effective date, and the ministry has been replacing its accounting instructions wholesale — in April it approved a new instruction on the chart of accounts for budget accounting, No. 193n. That is a pattern, not a stated plan. No published act we read says the two repeals belong to one programme.