In 2026, the richest Russians transferred 471 billion rubles to Russia’s budget, or more than 5.6 billion dollars, in the form of so-called wartime “gratuitous contributions”. According to Reuters calculations, this amount covered more than 1% of all government spending.
If it were not for voluntary contributions from big business, Russia’s budget deficit would now stand at 3.4% of GDP, Reuters calculated. In its estimate, the actual deficit is 3.2% of GDP, or 7.3 trillion rubles.
These contributions were discussed in March at a closed meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the country’s largest entrepreneurs, most of whom are under Western sanctions. The Russian outlet The Bell wrote that the head of Rosneft proposed the idea of collecting “donations” for Putin.
According to The Bell, oligarch and senator Suleyman Kerimov immediately promised to allocate 100 billion rubles, and at least one other major businessman supported the initiative. The British newspaper Financial Times reported that businessman Oleg Deripaska also agreed to donate money.
In September, Putin said that after that meeting, oligarchs had transferred “hundreds of billions” of rubles to the budget. The Kremlin, meanwhile, denies that the president asked entrepreneurs for funding.
Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that one of the participants independently proposed contributing a “very large sum of money” and pointed out that many wealthy Russians became rich in the 1990s thanks to ties with the state. According to Peskov, Putin supported this initiative, and the funds from these contributions in budget documents have already exceeded revenue from the corporate windfall tax, which was mainly paid by metal producers and fertilizer manufacturers.
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