‼️Russia: Budget [Fiscal] Rule Update Here is the Russian Ministry of Finance’s press release “On oil and gas revenues and operations for the purchase/sale of foreign currency and gold in the domestic foreign exchange market” This is connected to the NWF minfin.gov.ru
‼️Russia: Budget [Fiscal] Rule Update Here is the Russian Ministry of Finance’s press release “On oil and gas revenues and operations for the purchase/sale of foreign currency and gold in the domestic foreign exchange market” This is connected to the NWF minfin.gov.ru
I do want you to notice that they do this based on a guess, and as you can see here, their guess can be wrong. Sometimes more significantly than might think. So in the next table, look for this 👉- 10.04
Here is giant table that goes along with the press release that I have auto-translated to English. Remember, if you want the monthly data for previous years, you need to actually download the spreadsheet minfin.gov.ru
Here I’ve highlighted those adjustments I told you about. Notice that they can be off by a rather significant margin. (At the top, I also pointed out where the you need to click to download the spreadsheet, if you want to get that monthly data for previous years)
Remember that those blank spots were from when they suspended the budget rule earlier this year (because they were panicking) This highlighted row is the one I use in my table. This is related to the bucket 🪣 (transfer account) that belongs to the NWF. (Read those threads if you’re unfamiliar with what is going on)
Here is my updated table. Remember that the data on the right is just a rough guess as to what is going on in the 🪣 because we don’t have visability on what exactly is going on there. But this money belongs to the NWF even if it hasn’t been dumped into it yet.
For an example, when it happened everyone asked where this influx of funds came from in 2025. It when the 2024 additional oil & gas revenues that were sitting in the bucket were dumped into actual NWF accounts. It was some windfall, this money always belonged to the NWF, it was just in the 🪣
‼️ 🇷🇺 NWF Update As of September 2026: The liquid portion of the Russian National Welfare Fund holds: 👉 183.9960 Billion Yuan (-5.6873 billion) 👉 131.4879 tons of gold (-9,753.8 tons) 👉 1.6821 Billion Rubles (+1.6821 billion) (Totals for August) Dividend payments came in
The thing you need to watch for, is the the Russian government will use this to make it sound like things are going great, when they aren’t. On the other side, in an effort to simplify the explanation, some articles are too vague and give false expectations that the NWF will empty. Remember that this whole scheme is like setting up an automatic rule for your bank accounts. It’s backing up the budget spending. If they bring in earnings above what is expected based on the rule, they extra goes to the NWF via the 🪣. If it’s below, they pull cash from the 🪣 first, and then the actual NWF is that’s empty. Russia can change the rules, and they have because they don’t want to empty the NWF. It’s why they suspended this rule earlier this year. And they could even play with these things for propaganda purposes (or maybe to maneuver the ruble exchange value) So you see Siluanov talk about “replenishing” the NWF by up to 1 trillion rubles. This is just them moving money around. It on its own is not an indicator of overall health.
‼️ Russia: “Russia's federal budget could be executed with a deficit of up to 3% of GDP this year, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in an interview with Rossiya 24 television.” So like 7 trillion rubles?…unless it’s actually more than that. ru.themoscowtimes.com
It’s like you saying: 👉 I put 1 trillion rubles in my savings account 🏆! But not mentioning that you didn’t pay your insurance, you didn’t get an oil change on your car, didn’t pay for grandma’s medicine, and you still need to charge 7 trillion to the credit card, but… You’re struggling to get the limit on your credit card increased. Everything is still getting worse. Ok, I can see other headlines, and they’re related to this highlighted row from the table 👉 oil & gas revenues total I know this spreadsheet is a pain, and if you download it, it’s still in Russian, so I made you a spreadsheet of just that data so you can see the missing values.
Here is the resulting table 1 - (452.4/582.5) =0.223 22.3% reduction in September oil & gas revenues compared to last year
Just a reminder: Make sure you pay attention to ruble exchange rates when you’re looking at that data. Maybe not a big difference when comparing September 2025 to 2026, but other times it can skew things. cbr.ru
And when I say that, I mean that weakening the ruble can be a strategy used on purpose to increase oil & gas revenues. You can get the data at this link to display as a graph or table of values over a selected time period cbr.ru
Bonus: I transposed the rows and columns on their giant table and tried to get this data into one screenshot for those who need/want it. Here it is.
I want to put the two tables next to each other, because I think this might help reinforce what I was saying about the budget rule, and statements about “refilling the NWF” getting misinterpreted.
The total oil & gas revenues were significantly higher in 2025 than in 2026, yet they are “refilling the NWF” more in 2026. Things didn’t “get better” overall, they just changed their strategy.