Youth Crime in Moscow Jumps 152 Percent from 2024 to 2025, Russian Interior Ministry Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 22 – For the first time in more than a decade, crimes committed by young people rose by 10 percent in the Russian Federation as a whole and by a whopping 152 percent in the city of Moscow, according to the Russian interior ministry. And these crimes were increasingly serious with almost 50 percent of them being classified as especially serious.

            According to Nakanune journalist Elena Rychkova, these increases have sparked a discussion among Russian experts and politicians who collectively point to a wide variety of factors that have gone a long way to reverse the progress in this segment of law enforcement in recent years (nakanune.ru/articles/124595/).

            “Historical experience shows,” she writes, “the prevention of crime among young people is based on three things – accessible education, activities for children outside of school hours, and psychological support.” But “today,” she says on the basis of her discussions with experts, there are “problems with each.”

            Only 51 percent of schools have a psychologist, class leaders are overworked and underpaid and thus can’t devote attention to children with problems, and many who are involved with children don’t have the training required to do their work at all adequately, Rychkova continues.

Moreover, “children feel the general concerns of society” including economic instability and the growing gap between rich and power. And some of them are turning to kinds of crime specifically connected with these problems. Young Russians committed 2.5 times as many crimes involving terrorism in 2025 than in 2024.

Some officials want to reduce youth crime by cutting the age at which people can be tried as adults from 16 to 14, but that simply shifts the category in which crimes are counted and more than that means that children are more often sent to prison, out of which they come ten or more years later with even greater problems.

A particularly serious cause of crime among young people is that afterschool activities that used to be paid for by the government are now available only to children whose parents have enough money to pay for them, the journalist says. As a result, many who should be taking part and avoiding crime aren’t doing the first but are doing the second.

And the money going to patriotic forums isn’t proving to be the replacement of “real work with each child” that some have expected. It is time to recognize that free activities, sports teams, and professional psychologists are “not a luxury but a necessity.” If that isn’t recognized and acted upon, then crime rates among the young will continue to rise.