The draft budget for 2023 and the planning period of 2024–2025 were submitted to the State Duma. According to the document, in the coming years, the Russian authorities will face an astronomical budget deficit, which will lead to the almost complete depletion of the Russian financial reserves that the country accumulated in previous decades.
According to the Ministry of Finance, in 2022 the authorities intend to withdraw 3.2 trillion rubles from the National Wealth Fund (NWF) to cover the budget deficit, next year the budget plans to spend another 1.96 trillion rubles on similar measures, in 2024 – another 644 billion. However, this is far from all the expenses that the authorities plan to finance from the NWF.
At the moment, the government allocates billions of rubles from the National Welfare Fund for industry and other activities, for example, in March it was reported that the government could spend 1 trillion rubles on buying Russian shares. Tens of billions of authorities are ready to spend , for example, on supporting airlines. Similar expenses, apparently, have already been planned for future years, since the budget says that at the end of 2022 the size of the NWF will be 5.8 trillion rubles, and already in 2023 it will be reduced to 2.9 trillion, in 2024 – to 1.75 trillion, and by 2025 – up to 1.64 trillion rubles.
Only in 2025, in the baseline scenario, are the Russian authorities ready to resume the replenishment of Russian reserves, as Finance Minister Anton Siluanov spoke about earlier. It is planned to do this through the resumption of the budget rule. The minister allows separate injections in 2023 and 2024, but they are unlikely to be systemic. As of September 1, 2022, the liquid assets of the NWF were estimated at 11.87 trillion rubles. At the beginning of 2022, the volume of the NWF was approximately 13.66 trillion rubles.