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A new draft law would automatically sweep millions of frozen retirement pots into state-guided funds, unlocking a massive pool of domestic capital as Moscow’s wartime budget strains.
For more than a decade, millions of Russians’ retirement contributions have sat in frozen accounts that Moscow has quietly rolled over year after year.
Russia’s Finance Ministry has now drafted legislation that would move those savings, about 6.6 trillion rubles, or roughly $80 billion at current exchange rates, into a Kremlin-run long-term savings program starting April 1, 2027.
The draft would affect around 71 million citizens, with 3.6 trillion rubles currently held across 24 non-state pension funds and about 3 trillion rubles managed by the state development corporation VEB.RF for so-called “silent” account holders, citizens who never actively transferred their funded pension to a private manager.
The Russian service of The Moscow Times reported, citing RBC, that a government commission on legislative activity is reviewing the bill this week, with submission to the State Duma expected in early November.
Finance Minister Anton Siluanov has publicly framed the long-term savings program as a way to give citizens broader control over their money. “We want this money to be usable, to be inheritable, to be withdrawable in cases of special life situations,” he said last summer, in remarks recalled by The Moscow Times’ Russian service.
A freeze that never ended
The savings have been locked since 2014, when Moscow froze the funded portion of pensions and redirected the 6 percent of wages that had been building individual retirement accounts into current payouts, Izvestia explained. The official reason was budget pressure from an aging population. The freeze has been renewed every year since.
Most ordinary workers were left with savings they could not touch and little say in where they sat. While VEB.RF managed accounts for a slight majority of workers, private funds held the larger share of the cash, led by entities like NPF Blagosostoyaniye and NPF VTB Pension Fund.
Under current rules, those savings can only be drawn down from the previous retirement ages of 55 for women and 60 for men, and they are not freely inheritable. The new long-term savings program allows inheritance and withdrawals for hardship.
Record war budget, shrinking social spending
The Finance Ministry’s push arrives as Russia’s wartime fiscal strain deepens. On October 29, the State Duma passed the first reading of a 2027 federal budget allocating 17.1 trillion rubles, about $200 billion, to national defense, more than a third of all federal spending, The Moscow Times reported. The same budget trims healthcare and economic support by 3 percent, social spending by 6 percent, and housing and utilities by 8 percent.
The federal deficit hit 5.2 trillion rubles over the first nine months of 2026, equal to 2.2 percent of GDP, with the full-year gap projected at 7.3 trillion rubles, roughly double the original plan.
VEB.RF Chairman Igor Shuvalov, who oversees the state-held share of the frozen savings, has described those funds as a source of investment in modern technological projects, aligning the pool with Kremlin priorities rather than individual retirement planning.
While the balances remain nominally tied to individual citizens’ names rather than confiscated outright, independent economists note the move effectively creates a captive domestic market for government bonds and state-backed projects, helping Moscow absorb record defense deficits.
What citizens face
The transfer takes place automatically by law with no opt-in required. Rather than opting out of the program entirely, account holders will have a transitional window to choose which authorized fund manages their balance via the Gosuslugi state services portal without losing accrued returns.
