Corruption in Russia has Evolved Over Last Eight Years, Procurator General Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 22 – The Russian media focuses on corruption cases involving the powerful and the wealthy, but the Russian Procuracy says that the average individual charged with corrupt actions is someone who has never been charged before, a man between 30 and 49, typically a model family man with a higher education and violated the law near where lived.

            Based on an examination of 120,000 cases of corruption since 2018, the prosecutorial authorities say the most widespread forum of corruption is bribery, with 50 percent of all corruption charges involving such actions. But the share of bribery among corruption charges has risen from 48.4 percent in 2018 to 67.5 percent in 2025 (svpressa.ru/society/article/512072/).

            Fraud as a share of all corrupt actions for which charges have been brought, in contrast, has declined significantly over the same period, 21.4 percent to 12.2 percent, with the total of all corruption charges remaining roughly the same. The Procuracy report also reported that more than 80 percent of such crimes were the result of an individual rather than group action.

            Some Russian experts aren’t impressed with the reported figures. Kirill Kabanov, head of the National Anti-Corruption Committee and a member of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, is among them, as is Moscow attorney and rights activist Dmitry Agranovsky

             "I was surprised to learn,” the latter says, “that the 'average corrupt offender' is not a doctor, a teacher, or a traffic police officer for the simple reason that judging by the criminal cases I’ve seen, it is precisely these categories of professionals who are most frequently prosecuted."

            Despite this criticism, the procuracy report offers a glimpse into this aspect of criminality in Russia in the most recent Putin years, with bribery edging out other corruption crimes and fraud being significantly less of a threat or at least one the authorities choose to prosecute than many have thought.