New research is out!

Out of the black box:
new ways to understand Russia
using data

Publications 14

Research · Oct 2026

Leave the kids alone: How the Kremlin is grooming a new generation for war

Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, war has become embedded in Russia’s education system. Military propaganda has entered the curriculum, extracurricular activities, and everyday school life: pupils undergo military training, write letters to soldiers, and weave camouflage nets. The militarisation of schools does not necessarily turn children into committed supporters of the war. Still, it accustoms them to seeing war as normal, and to viewing silent participation in state-imposed rituals as part of everyday life.

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Research · Sep 2026

Elite repression in wartime Russia: how and why are officials prosecuted

After the start of the war against Ukraine, the Kremlin launched a large-scale campaign of anti-corruption prosecutions against officials: the number of arrests increased fivefold between 2022 and 2025. But these mass criminal prosecutions are driven not so much by the fight against corruption as by the Kremlin’s efforts to manage the elites in wartime. We examine who is being targeted and why, how the role of the FSB has expanded, and why the authorities need this tool.

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Research · Jun 2026

Shadow routes: how Russia learned to live with oil sanctions

Since 2022, sanctions have reshaped Russia’s oil trade — but not stopped it. New buyers, new routes, new infrastructure emerged to replace what was lost. By 2026, this system is under growing pressure from multiple directions at once. We look at how it was built, how it holds — and where it’s starting to break down.

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Research · Mar 2026

How Putin rules Russia’s nomenklatura

War has intensified pressure on Russia’s elite management. The nomenclature remains stable, but the rules have shifted: corruption charges are now a wartime tool to punish unsanctioned rent-seeking in defense. The system's survival rests on a triad of fear, incentives, and deep Moscow-centric socialization. Notably, while military and civilian officials face rising repression, former intelligence officers remain untouched. Based on a dataset of 700 high-ranking officials, we reveal how the mechanisms of Putin’s power have adapted to the new reality.

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Research · Jan 2026

From original sin to war expropriation: asset redistribution in Russia

Wartime Russia is experiencing the largest redistribution of property since the 1990s. The Prosecutor General's Office has filed over 170 lawsuits to seize assets worth more than 53.5 billion euros. Nationalizations and forced sales have affected 12% of the billionaires on the Russian Forbes list. What will be the consequences of such massive changes in ownership? Will the Kremlin be able to maintain control over the process? This study examines the scale of this wave of property redistribution, its effects on property rights, and the extent to which it could destabilize the regime.

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Research · Nov 2025

What makes one a fan of RT France?

RT France, the banned French arm of Russia’s state-funded TV network, still attracts a highly engaged audience, with a growing share of African users. Network analysis of its followers on X and Facebook links them to far-right politicians, anti-vaccine and conspiracy communities. Interviews show that across these groups, viewers share distrust of “mainstream” media and an affinity for RT’s image as a censored outsider.

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Research · Mar 2025

What do Russians read, and how can independent media reach them?

Despite censorship, independent media still operate in Russia. The main platform for them is Telegram, where channels of all political orientations coexist. However, "pro-government" channels are far more popular: our survey found that 44% of Russian audience of Telegram channels follow "pro-government" channels, while only 14% follow "oppositional" ones. To understand the reasons behind this, Cedar conducted a large-scale analysis of channels read by both supporters and opponents of the regime in Russia, and formulated recommendations for independent media.

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Research · Oct 2024

Manipulation in e-voting system in the Moscow City Duma elections

We investigate the vulnerabilities of Moscow’s e-voting system, focusing on the substitution of candidate identifiers as a method for manipulating election results. The 2024 Moscow City Duma elections provided substantial evidence of such manipulation, where candidate identifiers assigned to votes were altered. This manipulation allowed votes initially cast for opposition candidates to be reassigned to those from the ruling party, United Russia.

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Research · Sep 2024

Corrupted code: exposing fraud tactics in Russian
e-voting system

The first experiments with e-voting in Russia began in 2019. Back then, the main issues were the system's lack of transparency and technical glitches, but by 2024, observers had identified numerous cases of direct fraud: vote manipulation, account theft, result tampering, and others. In this report, Cedar highlights the major risks of e-voting systems using the Russian example.

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Research · Aug 2024

State of open data in Russia during the war

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian authorities have been regularly removing data from public access. Nearly 600 datasets disappeared from the "open data" sections of official websites of federal executive bodies. However, despite military censorship, access to many data fields is preserved. Openness infrastructure continue to operate due to the high inertia of the bureaucratic system and the middle-level bureaucrats' efforts to protect their turf.

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Research · Jul 2024

Tailored propaganda: how Russia manipulates public opinion in VK

Cedar analysed the media consumption of over 30,000 VK users, reflecting the socio-demographic characteristics of the Russian population. We found that propaganda adapts content style and narratives to different social groups and uses targeting methods to deliver them. Tailored propaganda posts are distributed centrally through networks of groups with multi-million audiences.

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Research · Mar 2024

How to uncover electoral fraud in Russia using statistics: a complete guide

Vladimir Putin won the presidential election for the fifth time, receiving a record 87% of the votes in the history of modern Russia, with an equally record turnout of 77%. With it comes a record level of falsifications. Cedar’s team has studied the detailed results of 12 federal elections during Putin's reign and documented various types of violations using electoral statistics methods. This is how Russian elections transformed from being relatively fair to a complete imitation of the voting process.

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Research · Mar 2024

Can Russian data be trusted? A hazard map of official statistics

After the outbreak of the full-scale war in Ukraine, many academics, experts, and journalists found themselves cut off from their usual sources of information about what is happening in Russia. The country's authorities have classified dozens important statistical indicators, and those that remain publicly accessible are increasingly suspected of being unreliable. Russian official data had previously raised questions, but now statistics has become a key part of "information warfare". We have selected 30 important indicators from different areas and assessed them for manipulation.

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Research · Mar 2024

Social media monitoring on the eve of the presidential elections in Russia

More than 100 thousand Russian public organizations are involved in election advertising. These mainly include schools, kindergartens, and local administrations. Public sector employees are directly campaigning to vote for Putin. At the same time, the presidential elections are not the most important topic on the agenda of state media. Here is a data-driven review of the Russian pre-elections campaign on social media.

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Our data

This section is in beta stage right now, but you can still request the data.
We will contact you and provide the access.

Elections

Election data covering all federal elections and a referendum in Russia.

  • Years: 2000-2024
  • Election results (number of voters, number of voting participants, results for each candidate)
  • Data from more than 90,000 election commissions
Explore

Court Decisions

Database of criminal and administrative cases in Russia

  • Years: 2000-2024
  • Cases: 5+ million
  • Court decisions, crime and sentencing descriptions and more
  • Data from 2000+ court websites

Propaganda

Archive of articles from Russian pro-government media RIA Novosti.

  • Years: 2001-2023
  • Articles: 3.5 million
  • Transcribed versions of TV broadcasts and other

At Cedar, we carefully curate our data and publish only what has value for further research. As the project develops, this section will expand, and it will become possible to explore and download raw data.

Our partners

About

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has become a closed country. Researchers have lost access to their sources. But digital methods can break through the new "iron curtain." Cedar is an independent think-tank aimed at providing data-driven research about Russia to the academic and expert community. Our goal is to enable civil society and government institutions to make more informed decisions.

Our team consists of independent researchers, data scientists and journalists who have been studying Russia for many years and are now working in exile. Over time, we have accumulated expertise and data, which have become more in demand since the new stage of Russian aggression in Ukraine began in 2022. Now, we want to help the academic and expert community better understand Russia using digital tools and resources that we provide. One of the project's founders is Arnold Khachaturov, sociologist and head of the data department at Novaya Gazeta Europe. Our senior researcher is Alesya Sokolova, the head of propaganda studies and an expert in social media data.
All our data are open but require a lot of resources to collect and process. We work mostly with alternative methods of data collection, such as web scraping and OSINT, but also with critically examined official statistics. We closely follow ethical guidelines for data collection and prepare detailed codebooks to make the data collection process transparent in each specific case. We often process the collected data for our own research but always keep an archive of the raw material for potential reuse.
At the moment, Cedar does not have a permanent source of funding. We launched the site with our own funds and partnership projects, which can be explored above. Now we are open to various partnership proposals.
Our team welcomes researchers, developers, data and ML engineers, and other specialists interested in developing an archive of Russian data. We also collect information about the needs of scholars quantitatively studying Russia, in order to make our work more useful. If you want to share your thoughts or participate in any of our projects, drop us a line using the form below.
Yes, a lot. But there is no public infrastructure to access it yet. Most of the data is stored in our repositories and is not available for download, but you can request it by contacting us. In some cases, we are ready to collect specific data upon request.

Contact us

If you want to request data, join the team or simply share your thoughts on the work we do — don't hesitate to leave us a message.

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