The Kremlin is preparing a 20% windfall tax on large companies’ 2025 profits—twice the headline rate of the 2023 levy—less than a month after the country’s most powerful oligarchs offered “voluntary” contributions to the war budget at a Kremlin meeting, Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SZRU) reported on 19 April.
Vladimir Putin pledged in his 2024 Federal Assembly address that tax rates would not change before 2030.
The Kremlin is moving to compulsion while oil revenues are at their highest level since June 2022.
Vladimir Putin pledged in his 2024 Federal Assembly address that tax rates would not change before 2030. In January, VAT rose from 20% to 22%. Now, with Q1 2026 showing the budget deficit at $60.5 billion—already 20% above the full-year plan of 3.8 trillion rubles ($50 billion)—big business is next in line.
The 2023 template, now twice as steep
The proposed levy would apply to 2025 corporate profits exceeding the 2018–2019 average, Interfax reported, citing a source familiar with the discussions. Putin directed agencies on 10 March to prepare the proposal by 10 April—the 2023 windfall tax collected about 320 billion rubles, or $3.7 billion at the time.
Whether oil and gas remain exempt in 2026 is unclear.
Only 3.3 billion rubles came in at the full 10% rate; the rest was paid early at a 5% discount. Oil, gas, and coal companies were exempt last time. The main payers were mining, metals, and trading firms.
Whether oil and gas remain exempt in 2026 is unclear. Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP) head Alexander Shokhin told Interfax that a mass windfall tax on the 2023 model wasn’t realistic because corporate profits were lower, but “targeted decisions” were possible.
With oil and gas revenues down 45.4% year-on-year in Q1 2026, a targeted decision on the energy sector would reverse the 2023 carve-out.
Who volunteered, and who didn’t
At the RSPP congress on 27 March, Putin asked assembled oligarchs for voluntary contributions to the war. Suleiman Kerimov committed 100 billion rubles ($1.3 billion). Oleg Deripaska agreed to contribute. At least one other billionaire expressed support without disclosing an amount.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov later disputed the framing. The initiative wasn’t Putin’s, Peskov said—a businessman had simply offered a donation of his own accord.
“The question is that there are no profits—many companies are operating at a loss.”
Shokhin followed up with a different message. Voluntary corporate donations “don’t really add up,” he told reporters. “All the mechanisms are in the Tax Code,” Shokhin said. “The question is that there are no profits—many companies are operating at a loss.”
The 2023 windfall tax landed on metals, mining, and trading—the industries Kerimov and Deripaska operate in. The same men asked to volunteer in March.
Trending Now
The Iranian oil windfall
Oil at $90 a barrel ought to ease the pressure. US-Israeli strikes on Iran in late February sent Urals crude from $53 to above $90. Washington eased sanctions on Russian oil for 30 days on 13 March. Russia’s seaborne oil exports earned $2.02 billion a week in the four weeks to 5 April—the highest level since June 2022, Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev told Euromaidan Press. Yet the Kremlin is moving ahead with the windfall tax anyway.
Even an oil price spike can’t close the gap.
Oil and gas revenues, once about half of Russia’s federal budget in 2011–2014, fell to 22% in 2025. Defense and security still take 38% of spending—the highest share since Soviet times. Even an oil price spike can’t close the gap. VAT went first in January, with the small-business exemption threshold dropped from 60 million to 10 million rubles, sweeping 450,000 firms into the tax system. Big business is next.
Inozemtsev—who in December 2025 argued the Russian budget would not face the catastrophe most forecasters expected, because the Finance Ministry could simply devalue the ruble to boost ruble-denominated revenues—says a collapse is not imminent.
But he also says the Central Bank and government together “strangled economic growth in 2025.” Western-style rate hikes met coordinated state price increases; inflation stayed high anyway. The squeeze on business, in his telling, is self-inflicted.
The pattern
The 2024 pledge of no tax changes before 2030 is broken. VAT rose in January. The voluntary-contribution route offered by the oligarchs in March has been replaced by compulsion. The 10% windfall rate from 2023, positioned at the time as a one-off crisis measure, is now twice as steep.
Each round has been framed as the last. Each has been larger than the last.
