Moratorium on fuel damper reset does not take plans to increase cutoff by 10 percentage points from Sept off agenda - Sazanov

MOSCOW. Oct 16 (Interfax) - The seven-month moratorium from October to May on zeroing out damper payments to oil companies when fuel prices on the exchange rise above a certain level does not remove from the agenda plans to increase the threshold for these prices to deviate from the benchmark by 10 percentage points from September, in other words retroactively, Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Sazanov told reporters.

"It complements it," he said.

The proposal to increase the indicator retroactively has been approved, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak has said. The Finance Ministry has already submitted the corresponding amendments to the Tax Code to the State Duma, but they have not yet been adopted. A presidential decree has imposed a moratorium on resetting payments to zero from October to May.

Sazanov also said the moratorium would be in effect until May 1, 2026, and no decisions have yet been made to make this change permanent.

"The effect on the budget will be neutral because the damper payments are written into it. They just won't be reset to zero here, meaning there will be no savings on expenditures. Expenditures will be implemented at the level budgeted for 2025," he said.

The government pays the damper to oil companies as a subsidy so that they hold down domestic fuel prices when there is a high export netback. But if wholesale prices in Russia increase too much and deviate from the prices set in the Tax Code by more than 10% for gasoline and 20% for diesel fuel on average in a month, the damper for that month is not paid.

So far this has only actually happened twice since the fuel damper was introduced. At the height of the price crisis in September 2023, oil companies did not receive the damper from the government because of high prices for both gasoline and diesel, and for August 2025 they did not get the damper for gasoline.

A bill has been submitted to the State Duma that would raise the range of price deviations to 20% for gasoline and 30% for diesel as of September. Exchange prices for September were at the upper end of these thresholds, so oil companies will only be able to get the subsidy payments if the thresholds are raised by 10 pp.