Research 11
- Mar 2026Elites
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. - Jan 2026Elites
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. - Nov 2025Propaganda
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. - Mar 2025Propaganda
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. - Oct 2024Elections
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. - Sep 2024Elections
Corrupted code: exposing fraud tactics in Russian
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.
e-voting system - Aug 2024Data Quality
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. - Jul 2024Propaganda
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. - Mar 2024Elections
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. - Mar 2024Data Quality
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. - Mar 2024Elections
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.