I've been tracking how Russia calculates its financing through bond borrowing. On 8th Dec 2025 they sold 20bn yuan worth of OFZ bonds, denominated in yuan. I've traced their budget numbers and they used the exchange rate on the 8th Dec 2025. (evidence thread for later reference)
Russia's newly updated budget plans "Government borrowing" of 5.0163tr rub to partly cover their 2026 budget deficit. This is a boring technical thread to explain why I think I understand this, and a bit of how they've been helped by the stronger ruble affecting some dollar/yuan debt.
Firstly, they raised a lot of money using normal, ruble-denominated OFZ bonds. In the attached picture, you can see that the money reported in the final budget law from internal bond financing equalled that reported from adding up the individual ruble OFZ sales. No space for yuan here.
Now the yuan issuance, it was 20bn rub on 8th December. On that date, the official Central Bank of Russia exchange rate was 10.7328 rub per yuan. So if that's the exchange rate they used, we should expect 214.656bn rub, right? The 9th Dec exchange rate would give 216.566bn rub instead.
There we go, 214.656bn rub in the 2025 budget law Appendix 6 under "external financing". Confirmed: yuan OFZ bonds are "external" financing, not "internal". And they used the exchange rate from the bond issuance date of 8th Dec 2025.