Russia Concealed Court Statistics on Missing Persons and Crimes Committed by Military Personnel

The Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation omitted data from its 2025 statistics regarding citizens declared dead or missing, as well as convicted military personnel and law enforcement officers.

This was reported by Verstka, which analyzed the department’s reports published on October 2.

In particular, the reports no longer specify how many such applications were received by the courts. For comparison, in 2024, the department reported a record 17,500 applications.

Data on convicted military personnel, judges, prosecutors, investigators, police officers, and employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service have also been omitted.

Data on those convicted of treason, disclosure of state secrets, sabotage, organizing an extremist group, and ‘discrediting’ the Russian army have disappeared from the publicly available statistics.

At the same time, the agency retained the figure for the charge of spreading ‘fake news’ about the army: in 2025, 90 people were convicted under this charge. Data on a number of administrative cases has also been redacted, including those involving ‘discrediting’ the army and violations of the rules governing the activities of ‘foreign agents.’

As a reminder, in June 2025, Militarnyi reported, citing Mediazona, that since the beginning of the year, Russian courts had received more than 26,000 applications to declare people missing or deceased. Commanders of specific units were named in nearly 12,000 of these applications, while another 9,000 involved other units of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation.