Even Before Becoming Veterans, Russian Soldiers Increasingly Engage in Violent Crimes against Civilians, ‘Vot-Tak’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 30 – Many Russians are terrified that veterans returning from fighting in Putin’s war in Ukraine will spark a serious rise in crime. They have good reason to be worried to judge from the results of a study of crimes committed by Russian soldiers still in uniform that has been conducted by Vot-Tak TV.

            Russian soldiers in Ukraine and even in units stationed elsewhere “kill, rape, and rob Russians, often outside the zone of military actions,” the study says; and it notes the most explosive growth in the number of such crimes took place in 2025 (vot-tak.tv/92314740/territoriya-bezzakoniya-prestupleniya-rossiyskikh-voennykh).

            During last year, military courts tried 352 soldiers for murder, “a third more than a year earlier,” Vot-Tak TV says. Relatively few of the crimes involved soldiers killing other soldiers – less than 20 percent – but rather soldiers killing friends, acquaintances or people they happen to encounter.

            The number of murder charges brought in military courts against Russian soldiers was not only 1.5 times as large as in 2024 but 16 times more than in 2022, the year when Putin launched his expanded war against Ukraine. For the period since then, military courts have brough 729 cases against Russian soldiers for murder.

            These cases cannot be explained, the investigation says, by the increase in number of troops. That figure is only 1.5 times larger than the expansion of the Russian army as a whole, a figure by the increases not only in murder but in rape and other serious crimes, including crimes against property.

            Up dramatically have been the number of Russian soldiers charged with rape. Since 2022, there have been 549 cases involving that charge. Of these, “no fewer than 312 were crimes against minors, including 249” – almost half – against persons who had not yet reached the age of 14.”

As horrific as all these figures are, they almost certainly understate the extent of crime among Russian soldiers, some of whom of course were convicted criminals before going to Ukraine and others have become corrupted by the violence that their officers either ignore or even promote.

The report says that “the entire zone of military action is a territory of illegality.” At least some of the soldiers who return to their homes after military service in Ukraine or even in the Russian military more generally are almost certainly going to continue to act in this way and harm other Russians. 

Impact of Ukrainian Drone Attack on Russia’s Oil Ports in Baltic Highlight Its Logistical Bottlenecks

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 30 – The successful Ukrainian drone attacks on the two largest Russian oil ports on the Baltic Sea, Ust-Luga and Primorsk, highlight not only the skills of Ukrainian forces but the logistical bottlenecks that Moscow has taken remarkably few steps to overcome and thus has left itself at risk of such attacks.

            Despite Russia’s enormous size, these two ports had been handling almost half of Russia’s oil exports, a reflection not just of the absence of other ports that might do so but of rail, road and pipeline connections from the point of extraction to the point of export (nakanune.ru/articles/124515/).

            Few other industrialized countries and none anywhere near as large as the Russian Federation have so many bottlenecks of this kind and thus, in time of war, are at such enormous risk of serious losses from attacks on a relatively small number of places both within the country and as far as its ports are concerned.

            So far, instead of considering how it might improve its logistical network, the Kremlin has focused on trying to improve its anti-drone systems. But until it creates a denser and more complete logistical network, something that will take enormous time and money, Russia will remain far more vulnerable to attacks with consequences far greater than they’d be elsewhere.

CIS Remains Useful but is Less Important than It Used to Be, Kazakhstan Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 30 – The Commonwealth of Independent States was created when the USSR disintegrated both to manage that process of peaceful divorce and to maintain cooperation among its members, two Kazakhstan experts say. It has achieved the first but is only one organization in which the countries involved interact.

            As a result, it is less important to them in general and to Kazakhstan in particular, political scientists Daniyar Ashimbayev and Talgat Kaliyev say, the CIS is less important than it was i but is still useful as one of the places in which former Soviet republics can interact (orda.kz/maksimalno-mirnyj-razvod-sostojalsja-zachem-kazahstanu-sejchas-nuzhno-sng-413117/).

            Ahimbayev stresses that the primary task of the CIS was to achieve a peaceful divorce of the post-Soviet republics to the maximum extent possible, and it has achieved that to a large degree. But it still represents one of several places where these countries can meet and talk about common problems.

            Kaliyev stresses that when the CIS emerged, its members were in most cases not involved in other multi-national groupings large or small. Now that has changed, and so the CIS does not have the unique role it did. That doesn’t mean it can’t play a useful role, but that role is now less than it was.

            Kazakhstan is able to use both the CIS and other organizations,” he says, because “to put it crudely we are in the Russian world, the Western world, the Chinese world, the Islamic world and the Turkic world,” all of which have their own organization. Consequently, the CIS now “isn’t some center of development but remains a working instrument.”

Targeted Government Financial Support and Outright Bans Won’t Reverse Collapse of Fertility Rate in Russia, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 30 – The Russian government acts as if targeted financial support of potential parents and outright bans of abortion will be sufficient to reverse the country’s rapidly declining fertility rate, but Russian experts say that such actions are insufficient because they do not address deeper trends that would have to be overcome for birthrates to rise significantly.

            And one of them, Yan Vlasov, the vice president of the Russian Patients Union, says that unless officials recognize this and address these other causes rather than assuming money and bans are enough, the population of the country will fall by more than half to 70 million by mid-century (nakanune.ru/articles/124513/).

            He adds that any family policy must recognize that a family involves multiple generations and not just “he, she and the dog.” Moreover, it must recognize that the share of young people whose physical and/or psychological state does not allow them to have children is both large and growing in Russia.

            There are many reasons for this, Vlasov says. “In schools there are no standards for food and among school graduates only a third are health. Children now sit for hours with their computers and don’t move around, and without movement, their hormonal balance suffers.” All this needs to be addressed rather than giving money and banning abortions.

            A second specialist, Mariya Milyutina who works as a gynecologist and reproduction expert, adds that “the level of testosterone among young men [in Russia] now is lower than it was 40 years ago and the quality of activity of sperm ahs fallen by ten times over the last 50 years.”

            She says that has led to less sexual activity among young people than among their parents. Unwanted pregnancies are thus fewer, but so too are pregnancies overall. Instead, young people turn to computer games and the like and won’t have more children or even can’t at current levels of sexual activity.

            And a third expert, Moscow psychologist Yevgeniya Ogarkova says that socio-cultural factors are at work as well. Many young people find it far more difficult to cope with the challenges of adulthood especially under capitalism than their parents did and thus decide not to have children.

            Moreover, many young Russians grew up in single parent families and don’t have any desire to repeat the experience. Some 40 percent of children are being raised in single parent households and unless that changes, a large share of them will decide not to form families and raise children either.

 

            Improvements in the economy and especially toward a more predictable future will help, but what won’t, the experts are unanimous in saying, is banning abortions. They should be the woman’s choice, and they warn that if abortions are banned in medical facilities, women will still get them at risk to themselves and to the chance they will ever be able to have more children.

Desertions from Russian Army in Ukraine Doubled from 2024 to 2025, Kyiv Agency Says

Paul Goble 

            Staunton, Mar. 26 – Between 2024 and 2025, the desertion rate in the Russian army nearly doubled, with at least 70,000 or ten percent of the total Russian force in Ukraine having fled from their units, according to Ukraine’s OSINT Insight portal which provides estimates Kyiv officials have made about the state of the Russian invasion army.

            The Ukrainian source adds that Moscow convicted “more than 18,000 people” of desertion between February 2022 and August 2025, handing out sentences of as much as 13 years, although this judicial effort has not slowed the flow of deserters (severreal.org/a/nu-ya-i-vystrelil-v-sebya-dezertirov-iz-rossiyskoy-armii-stanovitsya-vse-bolshe/33710680.html).

               According to the Idite Lesom project which helps those who want to avoid service or escape from it, the volume of inquiries they have received increased by 30 percent at the start of this year, from what was already a high baseline if the OSINT figures are assumed to be at least roughly accurate.

            In reporting this Ukrainian finding, the SeverReal portal notes that “there are no precise figures on the total number of Russian military personnel who have fled abroad” but that “experts estimate the figure “to be in the low thousands.” Initially, many went to Kazakhstan, but now Armenia has become the center for those who have deserted and fled.

            Russian deserters in that country have set up an organization called The Hard Sign to help those who want to flee. It provides information on how to do it and supports those who have fled the war once they reach Armenia with finding housing and work and ensuring they have the necessary documentation.

Putin Signs Law Making It Far More Difficult to Bring Russian Soldiers who Perpetrate Sex Crimes to Justice and Blocking Sharing of Genetic Information with Foreign Researchers, Russian Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 26 – At the end of February, less than two months after the government introduced it, Vladimir Putin singed a law “on the state regulation in the field of genetic engineering activities,” a measure that Russian experts tell researchers from Radio Liberty’s The System project has several dangerous consequences.

            By making all genetic data to be deposited in a national genetics center classified, they say, it will allow the government to decide whether genetic information could be released in the cases of Russian soldiers charged with sex crimes, a restriction making their convictions far more difficult (svoboda.org/a/suverennaya-genetika-rossiyskaya-biologicheskaya-nauka-ambitsiozno-otmezhevalasj-ot-mirovoy/33716011.html).

            The experts also say that classifying and restricting access to genetic information in the way the new law does will limit the ability of Russian scholars to develop useful medicines and also their ability to share information about genetic research in the Russian Federation with foreigners, thus reducing the chance for cures of certain diseases.

            And they say that the use of classification in this area will feed the mistaken notion of Putin and many around him that the West is developing biological weapons that will be used against ethnic Russians. That is impossible as Russians lack a common genome, experts point out, and so the notion that Russia should counter something that isn’t being done is absurd.

            None of the experts doubts that Russia and other countries need to develop laws to ensure the safe handling of genetic data, but they are unanimous that the measure Putin rushed through the parliament and now has signed is not the way to go about it. Far more research and discussion is needed, or the results of such a law are likely to be dire indeed.

For First Time in Fifty Years, Migration Flows have Now Shifted Away from Russia’s Major Cities toward Smaller Ones, Moscow Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 26 – Russian geographers and economists speaking at a Moscow conference this week say that for the first time in almost half a century, migration flows have shifted away from major cities toward smaller ones, with more residents leaving the megalopolises and fewer from elsewhere moving into them.

            This process, Russian experts say, began during the covid pandemic when people not only worked at home but chose to move to their dachas outside of the major cities to avoid the danger of infection; but this trend is being exacerbated by drone attacks on high-rise apartment buildings in the largest cities.

            As reported by Anastasia Bashkatova, an economics expert at Nezavisimaya Gazeta,  ever more Russians see living in high rise apartments posing greater risks to themselves than living in single-family housing. There is more of the latter in smaller cities and so Russian urbanites are moving there (ng.ru/economics/2026-03-26/4_9462_concept.html).

            The largest beneficiaries of these concerns, real estate experts say, are not mid-sized cities far from Moscow or St. Petersburg but satellite cities located closer to the existing megalopolises. If the war in Ukraine continues this trend will likely continue as well, changing the economics of home ownership and reducing the still strong pull of the largest urban center.

            And that in turn means that Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia’s largest cities are going to have yet another set of consequences for Russia, including casting doubt on the growth of large cities at the expense of smaller ones, given that ever more Russians apparently aren’t prepared to take the risk of living in such high-density places anymore.