Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
A quiet shift in how Russia pays for its war has been running through boardrooms since the spring, far from the front line.
Behind the public figures of defense ministry allocations, a second channel has been pouring money into Moscow’s budget this year: payments the Kremlin calls voluntary, and that the Russian business class has been handing over at a scale not seen before.
Russian authorities expect to collect 471.4 billion rubles, roughly $5.7 billion, in so-called voluntary business contributions to the federal budget in 2026, according to an explanatory note to the draft 2027-2029 budget first reported by independent outlet The Bell.
It would be the largest sum extracted this way since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
By mid-August, companies had already transferred 383.69 billion rubles to the treasury, Ukrainska Pravda reported, citing Russia’s Electronic Budget system.
For comparison, business contributions totaled 251.3 billion rubles in all of 2025, 160.26 billion rubles in 2024, 116.45 billion rubles in 2023 and just 2.95 billion rubles in 2022.
The March meeting that changed the flow
The jump dates to a closed-door meeting in March, when Vladimir Putin met with representatives of major Russian companies and, according to The Bell’s reporting carried by The Moscow Times, asked billionaires on the Forbes list to contribute toward the war effort.
Three billionaires, Suleiman Kerimov, Vladimir Potanin and Oleg Deripaska, offered at that meeting to pay a combined 460 billion rubles ($5.5 billion) from personal funds, in exchange for the Kremlin dropping plans to impose a windfall tax on their businesses, according to a source cited by business publication Ekspert and relayed by The Moscow Times.
Russian independent outlet Mediazona, citing The Bell, reported that the idea of “shaking down business in difficult times for the country” originated with Rosneft chief Igor Sechin.
The pace of payments confirms the March meeting as the inflection point. Before the gathering, only 15.6 billion rubles had come in. In the month that followed, the figure jumped more than tenfold to 159.7 billion rubles.
Officially voluntary, in practice a levy
Alexander Shokhin, who heads the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, has insisted the payments are genuine. “The fact that Russian business is helping the budget is a fact,” he said in remarks relayed by Ukrainska Pravda, adding that businessmen were transferring money from both corporate and family foundations.
The 471 billion ruble figure sits on top of Russia’s official defense spending and arrives as the federal deficit has blown through its target.
The Finance Ministry has raised its projection for the 2026 budget shortfall to 7.3 trillion rubles, or about 3.2% of GDP, roughly double the originally planned level, according to the Russian-language service of The Moscow Times.
Despite the influx of “voluntary” money, Moscow is not shelving the windfall tax it dangled over the oligarchs.
The government plans to introduce the levy in 2027 on Potanin’s Nornickel, Deripaska’s Rusal and gold producer Polyus, aiming for 200 billion rubles ($2.4 billion) a year, The Moscow Times reported.
The same budget documents project that voluntary business contributions will collapse to just 1.86 billion rubles annually from 2027 through 2029.
