Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said today that revenues from oil and gas sales have lagged behind schedule, contributing to a heavy current budget deficit for this year.

“So far (…) we have covered about 30% of the annual revenue. And we have covered 39% of the expenses for this year,” he said during a televised government meeting chaired by President Vladimir Putin by video conference.

“So we still have an interim imbalancewhich should be balanced with the progress of the budget execution’.

Russia recorded one deficit 3.4 trillion rubles ($44 billion) in the first four months of this year as spending increased, mainly due to Moscow’s military invasion in Ukraine and the decline in revenues from oil and gas sales.

Russian oil and natural gas is subject to a series of Western sanctions which limit sales to the West and also seek to limit the international price of Russian oil.

OPEC and its Russian-backed allies, known as OPEC+, agreed to cut oil production at the end of 2022 to support the market as the economic situation worsened, and in April a further cut was announced. OPEC+ will meet again in June.

While the announcement helped send oil prices sharply higher, those gains have since evaporated as fears of a global economic slowdown have intensified.

The price of Russia’s flagship crude, Urals, denominated in rubles, fell 14 percent in early May below the break-even level seen for this year’s budget, according to Reuters calculations.

Four months into the year, the deficit was 17% above the government’s plans for a deficit of 2.9 trillion rubles in 2023 as a whole.

Spending was 26.3% higher year-on-year, according to preliminary data, while revenue was down 22.4%.