Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the implementation of his May decree would require an additional 8 trillion rubles ($126 bln), although initially the amount of necessary funds was estimated at 10 trillion rubles ($157 bln).

"We made calculations... <...> I will show the cards to you: we argued until the day before yesterday, we calculated everything and brought this figure to 8 trillion. We believe that 8 trillion of additional costs will be enough," the head of state said at the plenary session of the State Duma, lower house of parliament.

"Initially, when we designed the program that was declared in yesterday's decree, we proceeded from the need to find additional 10 trillion rubles, maybe even a little more," Putin said.

Putin reminded that on May 7 he signed the Decree on national goals and strategic development tasks of the Russian Federation for the period until 2024.

He said that implementation of the decree implies several main expenditure items and one of them is healthcare sector.

"We need to create a certain number of rural health posts, which costs a certain amount of money, we need to digitize the entire health care and it also means expenditure, we need to change transport, we need to invest in medical education," the president said.

He added that other important items of expenditure are education and infrastructure.

"For almost a year and a half, the economic block of the government and my colleagues in the [president's] administration have been working on it," Putin said speaking about how the expenditure related to the implementation of the new May decree was calculated.