Russia’s budget will receive an additional 200 billion rubles thanks to rising oil prices amid the war in the Middle East, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said.
“We are expecting them [the additional revenues]. But I want to say right away that the levels of incoming and missing revenues over the past two months are the same,” the official said.
According to him, these figures will balance each other out. He did not specify why the Russian budget fell short by 200 billion rubles in March and April.
Context
At the end of April, the Finance Ministry acknowledged that tax increases for small businesses had cut treasury revenues by nearly a quarter. This refers to collections under tax regimes affected by the rise in VAT to 22% along with a lower income threshold at which the tax is charged.
Bloomberg also wrote that oil revenues received by Russia as a result of the war in the Middle East were unlikely to help Vladimir Putin revive the Russian economy, which is on the verge of recession. The agency noted that massive budget spending stimulates demand but not supply, because resources are being directed to military production whose output is destroyed on the battlefield.
Earlier, the Ministry of Economic Development said that in the first quarter of 2026, Russia’s GDP fell by 0.3% compared with the same period a year earlier. It was the first quarterly decline since the beginning of 2023.