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

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This project is funded by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and carried out in cooperation with its Russia Programme.

Authors: Fabian Burkhardt, Evgeny Miroshnichenko, Anastasiia P., Sonya Richter, Andrei Seryogin, Maria Ehrlich, Arnold Khachaturov

Infographic: Ksenia Storozheva

Key Findings

• The rise in the number of criminal cases against officials is not a fight against corruption per se, but rather a tool for governing the state during wartime. The number of arrests of non-military top officials rose from 21 in 2022 to 110 in 2025 — a more than fivefold increase. The surge in criminal cases began in 2023 with 43 cases.
• The risk of criminal prosecution for top-level officials — ranging from regional ministers to governors and federal ministers — has reached 2%, meaning that 2 out of every 100 are arrested annually.
• The anti-corruption campaign did not coincide with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine but was triggered by the war’s protracted nature. The trigger was the fall of 2022: military setbacks, ‘partial mobilization,’ and the transition to a protracted war, which required a reorganization of the home front.
• The one-year lag between the trigger and the surge in arrests is explained by the pace of the law enforcement process — the system requires a 6–12-month lead time to make decisions and prepare a case before arresting a suspect.
• The anti-corruption campaign in wartime Russia has three main objectives: oversight and fiscal re-centralization, managing competition among elite factions, and legitimizing the regime while shifting responsibility for failures on the front lines onto individual officials.
• Arrests of military personnel and Ministry of Defense officials have also become significantly more frequent, though this wave of purges began a year after the nationwide campaign.
• The crackdown on the Ministry of Defense was triggered by setbacks on the front lines, but it is primarily not combat units that are being targeted, but rather key financial administrators and the most capital-intensive sectors: finance, construction, and educational outreach. Only 8% of those implicated are members of the military command. Military personnel are judged more harshly than civilians — 94% of those sentenced to imprisonment receive actual prison terms, compared to 82% of civilians.
• The FSB has become the main driving force behind the nationwide anti-corruption campaign. The share of cases initiated with FSB involvement rose from 75.9% in 2018 to 89.6% in 2025. Thus, the FSB — not the military command — has become the leading security agency in Russia’s wartime state.
• The system began to prosecute corrupt officials not more severely, but more quickly and frequently. Median sentences remained virtually unchanged (9 years for bribery on an especially large scale), but the time from arrest to sentencing was reduced by a factor of three: from 40 months in 2018 to 14 months in 2024.
• Officials from frontline and occupied regions account for 20% of all arrested officials — although before the invasion began, criminal cases were rare in many of these regions. Here, 95% of those sentenced to imprisonment actually serve their terms.
• Confiscation has become a tool for replenishing the budget. The share of criminal cases involving confiscation rose from 20% to 31% after 2023. Total confiscations in the country jumped from 90 billion rubles in 2022 to a record 1.6 trillion rubles in 2025 — the peak coincided with the peak in arrests.
• There has also been a shift in the accompanying rhetoric: whereas the authorities previously justified the fight against corruption by citing its detrimental impact on the economy, in recent years they have increasingly emphasized the harm it causes to the country’s defense capabilities.
• The regime uses criminal prosecution to discipline the bureaucracy, redistribute resources, and demonstrate control. However, by relying on large-scale repression rather than structural reforms, it merely reproduces the very corruption it formally attacks — at the cost of growing administrative paralysis.
• Three scenarios are possible for the future: (1) an expansion of the anti-corruption campaign, (2) its stabilization at 2024–2025 levels, or (3) a return of the number of arrests to pre-war levels. Of these, a rollback (3) is the least likely: the regime can no longer back down without dismantling the coercive power vertical it has built and will therefore most likely continue to control the elites through criminal prosecution.

Introduction

Repression of the elites through anti-corruption campaigns in Russia has intensified in recent years: criminal cases against officials have been recorded with increasing frequency since the first quarter of 2023, and representatives of law enforcement agencies and federal executive bodies are increasingly implicated. Nevertheless, arrests of regional-level officials remain the most common — today, their chances of ending up in the courtroom are significantly higher than they were five or ten years ago.

According to official data from the Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, the share of convicted officials in the total number of convicts in Russia rose by 18.5% between 2018 and 2024. The number of military personnel who committed non-combat crimes has increased significantly, by nearly two and a half times. Against the backdrop of a continuing decline in Russia's overall conviction rate (minus 22%), this trend underscores the launch of a large-scale anti-corruption campaign.

However, the main goal of this campaign is not the fight against corruption per se, but rather a purge of the public sector using the resources of the law enforcement and judicial systems — a purge that is intensifying against the backdrop of Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The regime is entering a new phase of repression — this time, not against those who openly resist the authorities, but against the very systemic players who have ensured the regime’s preservation and stability for years.

Corruption has always been built into the Russian system of governance in two ways — both as a source of rent for the loyal and as ready-made compromising material (‘kompromat’) that can be used at any moment against those who fall out of favor. This is not a flaw, but rather the backbone of the entire system: it is through corruption that the mechanism of ‘joint responsibility’ — which Alena Ledeneva describes as the foundation of Russian governance — operates; everyone is ‘bound’ by mutual informal obligations and compromising evidence, and this joint responsibility exerts greater discipline than any formal rule. Therefore, the key question is not that corruption has begun to be punished, but that, after 2022, the repressive campaign has become so widespread. What lies behind this — whether it is merely the accelerating pace of arrests or a deeper transformation of governance patterns against the backdrop of war, in which the former system of joint responsibility is breaking down, and the rules of the game are no longer clear even to regime insiders — is what we explain in our study.

This report is structured as follows: after a theoretical introduction explaining the logic behind anti-corruption campaigns in authoritarian regimes and a description of the research methodology, we move on to an analysis of the typical profile of a corrupt official in Russia. In the main body of the report, based on our own empirical data, we analyze in detail the objectives the regime pursues: (1) oversight and fiscal re-centralization, (2) managing competition among elite factions, and (3) legitimizing the regime and shifting responsibility for failures on the front lines.

Anti-Corruption Campaigns in Authoritarian Regimes

The study of anti-corruption campaigns in undemocratic regimes has emerged as a distinct field of political science, largely influenced by the large-scale purges in China under Xi Jinping and the growing wave of prosecutions in some post-Soviet states. The key finding of this research is that anti-corruption law enforcement in authoritarian systems is determined not by the scale of actual corruption but by the regime’s shifting needs for control, elite coalition management, and legitimacy. It is, therefore, a political instrument of lawfare.

In the Russian context, this conclusion is supported by a rich tradition of research in the social sciences: Alena Ledeneva, in her work on the ‘blat’ system and informal networks, has shown that corruption functions simultaneously as both a ‘carrot’ and a ‘stick’ in relation to political and bureaucratic elites — it serves as a mechanism for ensuring loyalty within the administrative hierarchy. This leads to one fundamental conclusion: corruption is not a glitch in Putin’s system; it is a structural element of governance. Repression, accordingly, is not a fight against systemic corruption but a powerful tool for controlling elites and the bureaucratic apparatus, in which all members are bound together by an opaque system of ‘joint responsibility.’

The Russian political system has been masking pressure on the state apparatus behind the facade of the fight against corruption since at least the early 2000s. For example, Buckley et al. (2022) concluded that between 2002 and 2018, approximately 10% of all mayors of major Russian cities were arrested, and in 38% of cities, at least one mayor was arrested. They also note that the crackdowns were selective, with opposition mayors four times as likely to be arrested as loyal city leaders.

Moreover, the authors identify an official’s personal popularity as the decisive factor in protection: the larger the margin by which a mayor won the election, the less likely he or she was to be arrested. Popularity, therefore, turns out to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a popular local leader is useful to the regime itself—he or she mobilizes votes and helps maintain local support. On the other hand, his or her arrest risks sparking public outrage and protests (as happened after the detention of Khabarovsk Governor Sergei Furgal in 2020), and such a reaction is more dangerous for electoral authoritarianism than the disloyal official himself. In other words, criminal prosecution functions as a finely calibrated tool: the regime exerts pressure on the elites to enforce discipline, but spares those whose arrest could cost the regime dearly in the eyes of the public — or, if it does decide to remove an official, it plans such arrests with much greater care.

In his book ‘Governors in Russia’, Alexander Kynev notes that the Prosecutor General’s Office sharply increased its prosecution of civil servants in the early 2000s, resulting in several high-profile cases against regional officials. Furthermore, according to Kynev, after the Investigative Committee was definitively separated from the Prosecutor General’s Office in 2015–2017, five previously elected governors with relatively high levels of electoral support became defendants in criminal cases, confirming the thesis of Buckley et al. that popular and politically independent leaders (in this case, against the backdrop of the so-called ‘Crimean Consensus’ after 2014) can become targets of elite repression.

Historically, Russia’s track record of anti-corruption cases includes several high-profile episodes: the 2016 arrest of Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukaev — an unprecedented instance of the detention of a sitting federal minister under the Putin system; the cases of Governors Alexander Khoroshavin (Sakhalin, 2015) and Nikita Belykh (Kirov Region, 2016); and the 2023 sentencing of former Minister Mikhail Abyzov to 12 years in prison for embezzling approximately 4 billion rubles.

In 2024, the authorities set a new precedent: large-scale purges in the Ministry of Defense following the resignation of Sergei Shoigu, a longtime ally of Vladimir Putin. Some high-ranking officials from his inner circle ultimately found themselves in the courtroom. Another telling example is that of Roman Starovoit, the former governor of the Kursk Region, who, according to one account, committed suicide on the day of his resignation as federal Minister of Transport, fearing impending criminal prosecution.

As political scientist David Szakonyi (2024) demonstrates, authoritarian states accumulate compromising evidence against officials and use it retroactively — when corruption is accompanied by egregious failures in governance. Although punitive mechanisms have long served the Kremlin as a means of discrediting undesirable figures (one need only recall the high-profile case of Yuri Skuratov, whose career and investigation into abuses within Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle were cut short by the publication of compromising material), the current wartime political regime has undergone a qualitative shift. In this new reality, anti-corruption purges among officials have become a strategic repressive tool and a key lever of disciplinary control within the bureaucratic hierarchy.

It is important to remember the distinction between an authoritarian fight against corruption and purges in the stricter academic sense. Purges are aimed at eliminating key representatives of the ruling elite, either because they are perceived as a threat to the regime’s security and survival (for example, when an autocrat perceives the risk of a coup d’état), or with the goal of reducing the size of the ruling coalition, thereby increasing the rent-seeking opportunities for the remaining members of the ruling class (Sudduth 2017, Goldring and Matthews 2021, Zakharov and Sonin 2025).

In our report, we focus less on the ruling circle surrounding Vladimir Putin than on the state’s top bureaucratic elite, analyzing one subtype of repression against the elite — criminal charges of alleged corruption.

Drawing on comparative literature and research in Russian studies, we identify three main objectives in which anti-corruption campaigns can assist an autocrat. In the fifth section of our report, we will examine these three objectives in greater detail, using Russia as a case study and drawing on our rich and original dataset to demonstrate the mechanisms underlying the timing and scale of such anti-corruption campaigns.

The First Challenge: Oversight and Fiscal Re-centralization

In the absence of strong public oversight, corruption can spiral out of control, even as it distributes benefits among loyal elites. The lack of independent monitoring forces leaders to periodically reassert control through anti-corruption campaigns. Lorentzen and Lu (2018) formalize this idea: periodic re-centralization is structurally necessary in clan-based autocracies to prevent corruption from reaching a level that threatens the regime’s stability. Xi, Yao, and Zhang (2025) describe a related governance dilemma: leaders shift from a tolerant to a punitive model when accumulated institutional loopholes and public discontent begin to threaten the regime’s survival.

The Second Challenge: Competition Among Elite Factions and the Restructuring of Patronage Networks

Yang, Milanovic, and Lin (2024) identify several functions of anti-corruption campaigns: eliminating rivals, consolidating power, aligning subordinates' incentives, and restoring ideological discipline.

Fiona Shen-Bayh (2018) provides a theoretical basis for this logic through the concept of ‘the trial as ritual’: because internal rivals cannot be suppressed as easily as external enemies, the criminal trial serves as a public ritual that frames political dissent as criminal deviance. In this logic, the truth of the charges is secondary — what matters is the judicial performance itself.

Szakonyi adds that in such a system, accumulated compromising evidence is used to punish dissent among political and economic elites. In Russia, this logic is clearly evident in the case of General Ivan Popov, who publicly criticized the General Staff.

Zhu and Zhang (2017) refer to anti-corruption measures as ‘weapons of the powerful’: factional ties determine the selection of targets, rather than the actual scale of abuses. Zhu and Li (2020) identify two channels: the weakening of a patron leaves his clients vulnerable, and political insiders strategically use corruption charges against rivals. Li and Manion (2023) add that large-scale purges create vacancies that regional leaders use to form new patronage networks.

In the Russian context, political scientist Alexander Kynev has empirically documented this dynamic: regional officials become particularly vulnerable during a governor’s transition, when ‘members of the old teams lose their familiar mechanisms for lobbying and protection.’ This logic may partly explain the wave of arrests that followed Shoigu’s dismissal in 2024.

The Third Challenge: Legitimizing the Regime and Shifting Responsibility for Failures

Analyzing the late Soviet period, Leslie Holmes argued that when economic indicators deteriorate and legitimacy based on achievements weakens, authoritarian leaders typically turn to legal-rational legitimation — the language of law, discipline, and public accountability. Anti-corruption campaigns allow rulers (1) to feign sensitivity to public discontent over privileges, inequality, and abuse of office, and (2) to reaffirm the moral superiority of the ruling elite by demonstrating its ability to ‘clean up its act.’ The latter is undertaken to restore public trust when economic indicators no longer confer legitimacy. Thus, the goal is to shift the blame for systemic failures onto ‘bad functionaries’ rather than the system itself (Holmes 1993).

On the one hand, punishing officials can demonstrate the government’s effectiveness, as it still appears competent enough to enforce its own rules. On the other hand, anti-corruption campaigns can signal the authorities’ moral commitments and good intentions, demonstrating to citizens that the authorities share the public’s moral condemnation of unacceptable behavior (Tsai, Trinh, and Liu 2021). But, as we know today, anti-corruption campaigns did not help the Soviet leadership prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Therefore, it is important to note that the literature also documents a ‘boomerang effect’: Zaloznaya and Reisinger (2025) show, based on data from a representative 2018 survey, that Putin’s anti-corruption measures failed to convince Russian society of the regime’s sincerity — some perceive the prosecutions as evidence of the authorities’ inability to prevent corruption, while others view them as a politically motivated spectacle. Overall, the impact of anti-corruption campaigns on public opinion is ambivalent. On the one hand, they can strengthen the legitimacy of the authorities; on the other, they can catalyze the growth of political cynicism.

Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine Served as a Delayed Catalyst for a Large-Scale Anti-Corruption Campaign

Corruption within the Russian state apparatus had been documented long before the start of the full-scale invasion. As Szakonyi noted, evidence of corruption in the Ministry of Defense ‘has been apparent to just about anyone paying attention for decades now’ — and yet the system tolerated it. Furthermore, the government’s message is directed primarily at the elites, especially those who had previously flirted with an uncontrolled, independent political stance or whose loyalty is in doubt.

The overwhelming majority of members of the Russian ruling elite and bureaucratic apparatus were not privy to Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Since members of the elite were caught off guard and many of them undoubtedly felt — at least privately — dissatisfaction with the full-scale war or, at the very least, its consequences, the question arises: why did the crackdown on the elite not begin immediately in early 2022, but with a delay of more than a year?

Thus, starting in 2023 and especially in 2024 and 2025, we observe a qualitative shift: from the sporadic use of anti-corruption tools as weapons in intra-elite conflicts to a systematic campaign to reshape the behavioral norms of the bureaucracy amid military mobilization of the state apparatus.

The aim of our study is to explain the mechanisms underlying this shift using available data. In this report, we demonstrate that the anti-corruption campaign serves three purposes for the regime: it ensures oversight of the state apparatus and fiscal re-centralization (including discipline in military procurement and control over defense spending), manages competition among elite factions, allowing for the redistribution of patronage networks and assets; and legitimizes the regime’s authority by shifting responsibility for failures — on the front lines and in the economy near the front — onto ‘poor performers.’ Through this same lens, we explain why the attack on the Ministry of Defense can be considered a case that falls outside the general logic of wartime repression in Russia.

Key Trends in the New Anti-Corruption Campaign and the Typical Profile of a Suspect

From 2023 to 2025, the number of officials arrested in Russia increased significantly. While an average of 28 people were detained annually between 2018 and 2022, this number rose by a factor of 1.5 in 2023, more than threefold in 2024, and nearly fourfold in 2025.

In total, between 2022 and 2025, at least 278 criminal cases were initiated against 252 officials, ranging in rank from deputy heads of regional executive bodies to federal ministers. Two of the defendants are Deputy Ministers of Defense Timur Ivanov and Pavel Popov. These cases were excluded from subsequent calculations, as data on Ministry of Defense officials has been moved to a separate dataset. We will examine the Ministry of Defense case in detail in the next chapter.

About 70% of the regional officials in our dataset had strong social ties in their region at the time of their arrest — they had built their careers there, were born there, or had studied there. This means that those who ended up in the courtroom were more often individuals who had a stable network of formal and informal connections in their region — and even that did not save them from prosecution. This trend can be interpreted as pressure on regional patronage networks, as we described them in the theoretical introduction.

Case analysis shows that since 2023, the dynamics of crackdowns in specific sectors of the economy have also been changing (see fig. 3). The most represented group among those arrested continues to be leaders and holders of administrative and executive authority (regional governors, deputy governors, and chiefs of staff in various agencies). However, after 2023, their share has decreased significantly. Nevertheless, this is not because they have been prosecuted noticeably less frequently — after all, there is still an increase in absolute numbers — but rather due to a rise in the number of cases against representatives of other bureaucratic sectors. For example, the proportion of arrested officials working in the transportation sector and siloviki has increased. Among the latter, the number of arrested employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) and the Ministry of Emergency Situations (EMERCOM) has doubled since 2023.

The most striking trend: since 2023, frontline regions — Krasnodar Krai, Belgorod, Voronezh, Bryansk, and Kursk Oblasts, as well as the annexed Crimea and Sevastopol — have appeared in our sample three times as often. Overall, the start of the full-scale invasion has intensified the crackdowns in those federal districts where the echoes of war are most frequently heard.

While in 2018–2022 the ‘most corrupt’ districts were the Siberian and Southern Federal Districts (31 and 27 defendants, respectively), with the Central Federal District ranking only third (17), the picture has changed since 2023. The Central Federal District became the undisputed leader — with 58 defendants — and its share of total cases increased nearly sixfold. Among the regions where the number of criminal cases against corrupt officials has increased significantly since 2023, the Bryansk, Rostov, Voronezh, Ivanovo, Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, and Belgorod regions stand out — the number of cases in these regions has multiplied.

At the same time, the increase in arrests and convictions has not led courts to impose longer sentences on corrupt officials than before 2023. This may indirectly support the assumption that, in reality, the campaign is not aimed at eradicating corruption — in which case prison terms would have increased significantly — but rather at large-scale purges and at intimidating officials with the very threat of prosecution. In other words, it appears that the priority is removing the offending official rather than demonstrating that the crime they committed is unacceptable.

By law, the final sentence depends not only on the charges: it is reduced by a guilty plea, the existence of a pretrial cooperation agreement, the number of counts attributed to the defendant, the defendant’s age, and other mitigating circumstances. The only figure that has increased is the proportion of those sentenced to actual prison terms, from 72.6% to 82.1%, suggesting that courts are becoming less lenient in such cases.

At the same time, another mechanism of prosecution points to the tightening of sanctions against offenders: the re-prosecution of those already convicted or of officials whose cases involving similar charges had previously been dismissed. In our sample, 25 individuals are facing two or more cases: either a new charge is added to an existing conviction, or the state is reviving cases that had remained dormant for years.

The surge in such ‘reactivated’ cases after 2023 is particularly telling. Mikhail Abyzov, the former ‘Open Government’ minister who was sentenced to 12 years in 2023, faced a new fraud case in October 2025 — while already in prison. Sergey Furgal, the former governor of the Khabarovsk region, who received a 25-year sentence in 2023 for organizing murders, was also charged in December 2025 with fraud and forming a criminal organization. The case against Boris Dubrovsky, the former governor of the Chelyabinsk Region, which had been dismissed in 2019, was reopened in August 2025 under a new charge. For a number of defendants (Oleg Korshunov, Dmitry Maslodudov), the repeat conviction significantly increased their total sentences — in Korshunov’s case, from 7 to 16 years in aggregate.

This practice appears to be a distinct form of sentencing escalation: formally, the median sentences for specific offenses remain the same, but the pressure on individual officials increases as new charges are ‘stacked’ onto the sentence already handed down. In such cases, the system’s priority is not to symbolically increase the punishment for corruption per se, but to ensure — as reliably as possible and for the long term — that a specific offender is permanently removed from the political arena.

A typical defendant in an anti-corruption case is a man in his early 50s working at the regional level. However, since 2023, the proportion of women among those prosecuted has almost doubled, from 10% to 18%; a quarter of them worked in frontline or occupied territories.

The risk of facing corruption charges varies among officials in different positions. For example, between 2024 and 2025, not a single federal minister was prosecuted. However, we did not include the case of Roman Starovoit, the former governor of the Kursk Region and former Minister of Transport, who took his own life in 2025. It is known that testimony was given against him regarding the embezzlement of budget funds. However, we found no information indicating that a criminal case had been opened specifically against him. If we include Starovoit’s case, the risk of arrest for ministers would be at 2.4% annually and be on par with the risk for federal deputy ministers.

Charges have been brought against seven deputy federal ministers, including two deputies at the Ministry of Defense (there are currently 166 deputy ministers in total). Dmitry Bulgakov and Ruslan Tsalikov were not included in our sample. Tsalikov was arrested as late as 2026, while our sample is limited to December 2025. Dmitry Bulgakov, on the other hand, left his post as deputy minister more than two years before his arrest. Furthermore, according to publicly available information, he is accused of actions committed after his dismissal.

Criminal cases are pending against two governors — Maxim Egorov and Alexei Smirnov (Tambov and Kursk regions). We also counted 47 cases against top regional officials — including deputy governors, regional government chairpersons, and their deputies — and 42 cases against regional ministers or heads of departments and similar positions.

Top regional officials face the highest probability of being charged with corruption by the end of 2024–2025, nearly 3%.

Why Officials Are Being Imprisoned More Often — and How to Explain the Explosive Growth in Criminal Cases After 2023

All of our hypotheses regarding the reasons for the increase in the number of criminal cases against officials — specifically starting in 2023 — lead us, in one way or another, to a turning point: the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. However, the development of the anti-corruption campaign is not directly linked to the mere fact that the war began, but rather to its protracted nature. In the early months, the Kremlin assumed that the ‘special military operation’ would be swift and conclude within a few weeks. However, military setbacks in the initial phase of the war and the ‘partial mobilization’ in September 2022 compelled Russia to shift to a strategy of protracted war of attrition.

This transition required not only a restructuring of the military machine but also a reorganization of the ‘rear’: for the first time since the invasion began, the state faced the need to ensure long-term discipline within the bureaucratic apparatus, which is responsible for supplying the front, fulfilling defense contracts, and holding onto territories near the front lines. This is precisely why the mass anti-corruption campaign does not begin in 2022, but nearly a year and a half later — and gains momentum sharply in 2024 and 2025, when the need to ‘clean up’ and discipline the rear becomes just as urgent a task for the regime as waging war.

Below, we examine the three objectives that the anti-corruption campaign fulfills for the regime during wartime: strengthening the security apparatus and fiscal re-centralization, redistributing patronage networks among elite factions, and legitimizing the regime by shifting responsibility for failures onto ‘incompetent personnel.’

None of these explanations is exhaustive — most likely, the observed growth is driven by a combination of all three mechanisms operating in parallel.

The First Objective: Oversight and Fiscal Re-centralization

The FSB is strengthening its position. Criminal cases against officials are becoming a significant incentive for security officials to advance up the career ladder

Under Russian law, various law enforcement agencies—the Investigative Committee, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB (Federal Security Service), and the Prosecutor General’s Office — can initiate and investigate criminal corruption cases. (The Prosecutor General’s Office can only initiate investigations; it lost its authority to conduct investigations back in 2009. The Investigative Committee, meanwhile, is the body that handles the vast majority of corruption-related criminal cases.) However, in practice, as our data shows, the FSB is the primary source of evidence for subsequent criminal cases against officials.

At the same time, the share of cases in which the FSB’s work is mentioned in court rulings or media reports rose from 75.9% in 2018 to 89.6% in 2025. This figure includes both cases in which the FSB is the sole initiator and those in which the agency works in conjunction with other law enforcement agencies. Consequently, the share of cases initiated by and involving investigative actions by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (for example, the Directorate for Economic Security and Anti-Corruption, UEBiPK) and other law enforcement agencies has decreased.

This once again confirms the thesis that the FSB has grown in power, having effectively become a ‘super-agency’ in recent years. In addition to investigating cases, the service controls its own pretrial detention centers. Its officers are seconded to major universities, enterprises, and even other law enforcement agencies. And more recently, it has also been overseeing internet blockades and shutdowns.

The law enforcement system in Russia is structured according to the divide et impera principle — the security apparatus consists of the separate Investigative Committee, various departments and divisions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the National Guard, the Federal Penitentiary Service, the Military Police operated by the Ministry of Defence and the FSB, as well as several other, smaller agencies. In this situation, exacerbated by a punitive system and a complex performance measurement system

(‘palochnaya sistema’), agencies are constantly under pressure to rack up points and outperform their counterparts. The outbreak of a large-scale war and the anti-corruption campaign provided the FSB with an excellent opportunity to prove its worth and establish itself as the primary agency responsible for consolidating the elites and ensuring the security of the governing hierarchy.

FSB units are detaining government officials, conducting searches, and interrogating them. And these are sometimes not even high-ranking officials. For example, in June 2025, the Investigative Committee detained three employees of the Ministry of Emergency Situations’ supervisory department for the Leningrad Region. ‘Apparently, the FSB operatives involved in the operation found ways to get the detainees to recall a great deal,’ writes the regional publication 47news. As a result, within just three weeks, law enforcement officials traced the chain of command all the way up to a colonel in the internal service, the deputy head of the EMERCOM Main Directorate for the Leningrad Region. He is accused of accepting a bribe of 222,000 rubles.

With the start of the war, law enforcement agencies gained the opportunity to expand their influence and increase their funding, in part through the fight against corruption — positioned as a battle against internal enemies who are plundering the tight budget and ‘undermining the authority of public authorities and people’s faith in justice.’ While 1.6 trillion rubles (7.85% of the budget) were spent on ‘National Security and Law Enforcement’ in 2021 — before the war — 3.8 trillion rubles (8.68%) are planned for 2026. The powers of the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Federal Security Service have also been significantly expanded.

Another factor also supports the hypothesis that the siloviki are being strengthened: we are seeing a significant reduction in the time it takes to identify and investigate criminal cases. After 2023, law enforcement agencies will need less than half a year to bring to their attention a corrupt official who has committed a crime. This means that law enforcement agencies are accelerating the pace of their work, and corruption — which was previously more readily overlooked — is now being investigated almost immediately.

In more than 90% of cases, the arrest of a corrupt official occurs almost simultaneously with the initiation of the case, meaning the authorities do not waste time and only come for the official once the operational investigation into him or her has been completed. In reality, only days — and often just hours — pass between these two procedural steps. In another 4% of cases, the gap is 1–3 months. Only in 5% of cases does more than four months elapse between the initiation of the case and the arrest.

These statistics do not correspond to how the criminal prosecution mechanism is supposed to work in theory. Normally, a case is first opened, an investigation is conducted, and — based on the evidence gathered — the suspect is detained. In reality, the opposite happens in Russia: law enforcement agencies first gather evidence through operational means (under the Law on Operational-Investigative Activities, without a formal criminal case and without suspects having a sufficient set of procedural rights), and when they have everything ready, they open a case and arrange for the suspect’s arrest almost immediately.

As a result, the accelerated investigative process has also affected the overall duration of the case. The time from arrest to sentencing is now half as long. This may send a political signal that delays are unacceptable in the fight against corrupt officials — and, as a result, it may lead to even greater deterioration of the procedural system, in which the speed of the investigation takes precedence over its quality.

Even before the war, the Russian justice system handled such cases quickly and almost always in ways that led to convictions — the overwhelming majority of cases reached court already ‘packaged,’ with a guilty plea or a pretrial agreement, and the judge was left only to formalize a predetermined outcome. The bottleneck has always been the operational-investigative stage — the collection of evidence, its legal validation, and coordination within the security apparatus. Therefore, when the regime decided to accelerate the campaign, the only place to find the resources for acceleration was there: the investigation, which actually takes time, can be expedited, whereas the court merely rubber-stamps the result.

At the same time, this assembly-line system and its speed generally benefit both sides: defendants, seeking leniency in court, cooperate with investigators and often testify against other corrupt officials — thus, law enforcement agencies gain the opportunity to unravel entire tangles of cases and increase the number of investigated cases through a domino effect. The result is a mutually beneficial ‘cooperation’: the suspect is offered the prospect of a reduced sentence, while law enforcement agencies boost their performance metrics.

Against the backdrop of a budget shortfall, confiscating assets from corrupt officials is a convenient way to replenish the state budget

According to official data, since the start of the war with Ukraine, the Prosecutor General’s Office has sharply increased the practice of seizing assets in corruption cases.

Nevertheless, the figures show an upward trend: in cases prior to 2022, criminal forfeiture was ordered in 20% of cases; in cases from 2023 onward, it was ordered in 31% of cases. The share of non-criminal forfeitures in our sample has also risen slightly: the prosecutor’s office is increasingly using the civil-law mechanism for asset seizure, which does not require proof of the elements of a crime. It is sufficient to prove that the property could not have been acquired with official income.

Furthermore, the median amounts of assets seized through civil proceedings are many times higher than those confiscated under the Criminal Code — 308 million rubles versus 1.55 million rubles — and sometimes even run into the billions. For example, in 2020, a court ordered the seizure of assets worth over 32.5 billion rubles from Mikhail Abyzov, the former Minister for Open Government Affairs. In 2025, a court confiscated assets worth more than 100 billion rubles from Magomed-Sultan Magomedov, the former Secretary of State of Dagestan.

In total, the individuals featured in our dataset received court orders for the seizure of cash alone amounting to at least 164 billion rubles between 2018 and 2025 (excluding cases where the exact amount seized or the value of the seized property is unknown). Nevertheless, even this amount pales in comparison to the value of companies seized from entrepreneurs who combined business interests with their roles as senators or deputies for violations of anti-corruption laws. We wrote in more detail about these cases in the report ‘From original sin to war expropriation: asset redistribution in Russia.’

The state acts as an agent that redistributes rents already extracted through criminal prosecution and confiscation. This strengthens incentives to expand law enforcement practices against those groups where the largest rent flows are concentrated, primarily within the bureaucracy and state-affiliated business circles.

Classical works emphasize that the state’s ability to extract resources and control elites is a key element of its institutional power. In this context, the confiscation of property and the criminal prosecution of officials can be viewed as ways of strengthening the state’s extractive function.

Exemplary Punishments for Their Own: Corruption-related Persecution as a Tool of Institutional Discipline in Wartime

One of the key explanations for the increase in anti-corruption prosecutions in Russia after 2024 is the logic of ‘exemplary punishment’ — the targeted use of criminal prosecution not so much to eradicate corruption as a systemic phenomenon, but rather to demonstrate the consequences of ‘disloyal’ or ‘improper’ behavior in wartime conditions. This is not about fighting corruption in its classical sense, but about reshaping the rules of the game within the executive elite.

With the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and especially after 2024, the Kremlin began sending a clear signal to the elites: public extravagance and disloyalty are no longer acceptable. In this sense, the anti-corruption campaign is a convenient and universally understandable mechanism for enforcing behavioral norms: a significant portion of officials have a blemish on their record that can be seized upon to launch a criminal case.

From this perspective, this initiative is being carried out not so much to replenish budget revenues at the expense of corrupt officials, but rather to intimidate and impose new rules of the game. And in this sense, the war serves as a convenient cover. In an effort to demonstrate that rising military spending will reach the front lines, the Kremlin has taken aggressive measures to remove officials who lead ostentatiously lavish lifestyles or have criticized the military command. Criminal proceedings serve as a tool of intimidation, setting new boundaries for acceptable behavior across the entire bureaucracy.

This logic is evident in the case of Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, who was arrested in April 2024; according to investigations, he was a billionaire and an active participant in Moscow’s high society. Yet corruption in the Ministry of Defense had long been an open secret. The 2012 'Oboronservis' scandal, which led to criminal convictions and the resignation of Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, exposed large-scale embezzlement within the ministry, but did not trigger a broader purge. Only after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine did arrests become widespread across the Defense Ministry. The elites interpret these signals from above as meaning that the era of excessive greed is over and that everyone must make some sacrifices to prevent the regime from collapsing from within.

In a broader theoretical context, this practice fits into the logic of authoritarian governance, which researchers describe as ‘suspended punishment’ — every Russian official knows that the state can find him or her guilty at any moment. The war has merely activated this mechanism, transforming it from a hidden threat into an instrument of mass behavioral correction. The figures confirm the scale of the phenomenon: according to former Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov, in 2024 nearly 30,000 officials faced disciplinary action for violating anti-corruption rules, and about 500 were dismissed due to a loss of trust.

In parallel with the cases against high-ranking military officials, pressure on regional officials has also intensified. As Novaya Gazeta Europe reports, an unambiguous signal is being sent to the elites: the rules of the game have changed; a different level of loyalty is now required; and ‘proper’ behavior is dictated by fear of potential criminal prosecution. Even mid-level and lower-level officials are now expected to demonstrate loyalty.

At the same time, the campaign is also pursuing related objectives, including the redistribution of financial flows. This is hardly the Kremlin’s main goal; rather, it is a welcome bonus. Anti-corruption expert Ilya Shumanov characterizes what is happening as a campaign that ‘is less aimed at fighting corruption and more at restructuring and nationalizing financial flows in the interests of Russia’s confrontation with the West.’ In other words, fear keeps officials in line, while criminal cases simultaneously redirect the assets and cash flows they control — these are interrelated effects of a single campaign.

The Second Objective: Competition Among Elite Factions and the Redistribution of Patronage Networks

The Ministry of Defense Case: The Elimination of Sergei Shoigu’s Clan and the Restoration of Financial Control

Criminal cases against high-ranking military officials are the most striking illustration of how the first objective of the anti-corruption campaign (oversight and fiscal decentralization) intersects with the second (intra-elite competition and the redistribution of patronage networks).

On the one hand, the arrests at the Ministry of Defense signal that the regime has deemed corruption and elite rent-seeking within the military establishment to be excessive. A key indication that this is specifically about fiscal re-centralization is that the new defense minister appointed in May 2024 was not a military figure but rather the economist Andrei Belousov. He was not permitted to build his own team at the ministry, but he was tasked with establishing a technocratic order there.

On the other hand, the situation at the Ministry of Defense also illustrates the infighting among clans. Sergei Shoigu’s clan was almost completely dismantled, and criminal cases were brought against even those closest to him: Timur Ivanov, Ruslan Tsalikov, Pavel Popov, and others. Without reaching Shoigu himself, the repressive machine has purged his inner circle — including those who were his allies back when he served as head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations.

However, it is important to emphasize that the ‘Belousov clan’ did not replace the dismantled Shoigu clan. The new minister does not have his own team; instead, the Ministry of Defense is coming under the collective responsibility of various influential groups — Putin’s confidants (Anna Tsivileva, Mikhail Fradkov Jr.), officials linked to the FSB, and representatives of the military establishment. This is not a replacement of one clan with another, but a structural reorganization of the ministry toward more decentralized control.

And one more important clarification: the dismantling of Shoigu’s clan cannot be considered a ‘purge’ in the strict academic sense. Shoigu himself was never a political rival to Putin and did not build an independent center of power capable of threatening the regime’s stability. Therefore, it is more accurate to speak not of political elimination, but of punishing the ministry for military failures and excessive corruption, compounded by the struggle among elite factions for control of military funding. In this sense, the Defense Ministry case defies the general logic of the crackdown on officials: here, it was not a ‘disloyal maverick’ or a regional clan that came under fire, but an entire ministry deemed institutionally ineffective under the new military conditions.

We compiled a separate dataset of cases involving military personnel who were targeted in the purges within the Russian Ministry of Defense. It includes 101 criminal cases against leaders of the Ministry of Defense and legal entities under its jurisdiction — such as unitary enterprises, industrial production facilities, and joint-stock companies — established to support the Ministry of Defense’s operations. We then analyzed this dataset both on its own and in comparison with the dataset of 421 non-military officials.

Unlike the main dataset, this one also included lower-level officials (heads of various directorates, divisions, and departments within the ministry and related defense structures). We did this intentionally to study the Ministry of Defense case in as much detail as possible and to trace interconnected criminal cases. As of March 2026, courts of first instance had already handed down verdicts for 56 of the 101 defendants.

As we described above, the non-military sample shows a visible increase in arrests beginning in 2023, with the number gradually rising, while the crackdown at the Ministry of Defense began in early 2024. Among military personnel, there were only three detentions in 2023, followed by a sharp surge: 36 cases in 2024 and 21 in 2025. In total, from early 2024 through March 2026, we identified more than 60 cases — twice as many as in all previous years combined.

This timeline (see fig. 15) coincides with a very clear institutional trigger: on April 24, 2024, Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov was arrested for taking a bribe; on May 12, Sergei Shoigu was removed from his post as defense minister and replaced by Andrei Belousov. Following this, nearly one-third of the Ministry of Defense’s leadership was replaced: 19 of 70 heads of departments, services, and directorates, primarily those responsible for finance, construction, and logistics.

However, the mere coincidence of the start of the purges with the change in leadership at the Defense Ministry does not in itself mean that Shoigu’s dismissal triggered the purges or that the new minister, Belousov, is building a new team for himself by ruthlessly dismantling the old one. The scale of the campaign suggests that the purges were prepared in advance, while the former minister was still in office, and that the order to carry them out — right in the midst of the invasion of Ukraine — came from the top. In this sense, the fight against corruption is merely a facade concealing much deeper reasons behind the attack on the Ministry of Defense.

For decades, the Russian system of governance operated according to a principle that political scientist Nikolai Petrov described in Vedomosti (2019) as ‘the primacy of loyalty over effectiveness, with a guarantee that one’s status will not be diminished as long as loyalty is maintained.’ The model described by Konstantin Sonin operates on the same logic: in undemocratic regimes, a dictator is forced to choose between loyalty and competence, and almost always chooses the former. An expert report by the Carnegie Moscow Center articulates this basic rule of Putin’s Russia even more bluntly: ‘Absolute political loyalty among key personnel is more important than technocratic efficiency.’

The case of the Ministry of Defense illustrates how, perhaps for the first time in Russian history, an entire ministry — one that could not be accused of disloyalty, but certainly of utter incompetence and inefficiency — was dismantled. The Russian leadership, by all appearances, was not prepared for a protracted conflict and had hoped for a quick resolution of the ‘Ukrainian problem’ within a few days or weeks. Furthermore, 2023 — the year preceding the wave of dismissals at the Ministry of Defense — was marked, among other things, by a conflict between the Ministry of Defense and the Wagner Group, which led to a raid on Moscow by the group’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Some researchers agree that the reason for the Ministry of Defense’s downfall lies in its operations: Mikhail Komin identifies the main goal of this entire anti-corruption campaign as making the ministry more ‘efficient.’

Another distinction between officials from the Ministry of Defense and the other convicted individuals in our sample is that the courts impose much harsher penalties on them. Of the 51 defendants in the ‘military’ dataset who were sentenced to imprisonment, 48 received actual prison terms — 94% of cases. This is significantly higher than the sentences received by officials from other agencies for corruption (82% in the period after 2023).

A similar percentage of actual prison terms is imposed on federal officials and regional officials from frontline areas — those whose positions and status within the hierarchy are particularly sensitive due to political and military circumstances. Furthermore, cases involving military personnel proceed from arrest to sentencing at a faster median rate than cases against civilians (15 months versus 21), and their median prison terms for official misconduct are twice as long.

Taking performance criteria into account for retaining positions does not mean that this approach is applied consistently or that corruption in the military will actually decrease. But the formal signal is clear: during wartime, a manager who has failed in his or her area of responsibility may be punished not for disloyalty, but precisely because loyalty proved insufficient to excuse the failure. Ivanov, Popov, Kuznetsov, Shamarin, Tsalikov, and Bulgakov made up Shoigu’s inner circle; Shoigu himself was previously one of Putin’s most trusted confidants but has now been relegated to the ceremonial post of Secretary of the Russian Security Council.

The nature of the charges against corrupt military personnel indirectly confirms this thesis. Officially, they are being imprisoned for bribery, but the frequent mention of charges related to abuse of authority and official forgery points to a shift in focus: Investigators are interested not only in specific money transfers but also in the decisions and documents themselves — fictitious acceptance certificates, forged reports on the construction of fortifications, and the misuse of state defense procurement funds.

In other words, the formal charge is corruption, but the criterion for selecting those implicated has changed: it is no longer the maximum amount of bribes within the system, but rather the agency’s failure in a wartime context. This marks the introduction of an “effectiveness” criterion that was absent in the previous system. This is indirectly confirmed by the appointment of Belousov, an economist and technocrat with no ties to any particular agency.

The four most high-profile figures in this campaign, as listed in our table, provide a concise illustration of its internal logic — from the clan’s core to its periphery.

Another obvious consequence of the dismantling of the former Ministry of Defense is that the agency is undergoing a structural transformation. The composition of the new deputy defense ministers indicates that the president personally wants to control the restructured agency: among those appointed to deputy minister positions are his niece Anna Tsivileva and Pavel Fradkov, a former FSB officer and former deputy head of the Presidential Property Management Department. As Mikhail Komin writes, the system is being restructured to allow for tighter political control and greater efficiency in military spending — but the question remains open as to whether the Kremlin is achieving real efficiency or whether the ‘old system’ has already devised new ways to embezzle funds from the treasury and the front lines.

Reorganization of Spheres of Influence — ‘Horizontal Redistribution’

To describe the system of governance in modern Russia, researchers often use the patron-client relationship model (Masyutina 2025). The corrupt element in this model plays a dual role. On the one hand, it provides access to rent, a fundamental element of the patronage mechanism. On the other hand, it serves as a system of control that is activated when necessary and takes the form of repression.

The patron-client model can be viewed as a framework not only for interactions among different levels of government (federal, regional, and local) but also for the functioning of each level individually. In this context, a regional leader may act as a patron toward members of his or her team with whom he or she is linked by rent-seeking relationships. In this context, repression for corruption becomes not only a means of control and ensuring clients’ loyalty to the patron, but also a lever of pressure on the patron himself.

This situation can be tentatively described as a ‘horizontal’ redistribution of spheres of influence, in which the team members of a regional administrator or an administrator within a single agency — who is, in essence, the intended target of the attack — are subjected to direct reprisals. Meanwhile, the patron himself may suffer little harm and formally move on to a higher-level federal position. However, in reality, his departure destroys the patron-client relationship; his team loses its patronage and protection; and he himself is forced to lie low to avoid becoming a victim of repression — and thus a change in the regional elite takes place.

The case of the former governor of the Krasnoyarsk Krai — one of Russia’s largest industrial and resource-extracting regions — illustrates how this mechanism works in practice. In April 2023, Alexander Uss stepped down from his post. He accepted a ‘promotion’ and became a member of the upper house of the Russian parliament. At that time, a criminal case against the region’s former Minister of Forestry, Dimitri Maslodudov, was already pending in court. And by the summer of 2023, criminal cases had been filed against Minister of Transportation Konstantin Dimitrov and First Deputy Governor — Chairman of the Regional Government — Yuri Lapshin. All three ultimately received guilty verdicts: Maslodudov for fraud and bribery, and Dimitrov and Lapshin for exceeding their powers. It is not surprising that, under these circumstances, the governor’s move to a federal position was seen by some as an attempt to gain a certain degree of immunity, even if only temporary.

Another case occurred in the Leningrad Region. In January 2023, Oleg Zinchenko, first deputy chairman of the Leningrad Region governor’s control committee, was charged with accepting a bribe. In February 2023, Sergey Shalygin, first deputy chairman of the Leningrad Region’s Construction Committee, was detained while accepting a bribe. According to media reports, his immediate superior, Konstantin Pankratyev, suddenly resigned just a few hours before his deputy’s detention. At that time, Yuri Andreev, chairman of another committee — the Fuel and Energy Complex Committee — was already in custody. He, too, had been detained for accepting a bribe.

Even earlier, in August 2022, Sergey Kharlashkin, deputy head of the Leningrad Region government, was sent to a pretrial detention center on charges of abuse of authority. Finally, in May 2023, Yegor Vlasov, deputy chairman of the regional committee on healthcare, was detained on charges of fraud and bribery. Some link all these arrests of regional government officials to the conflict between the governor and Alexander Gimadiev, the head of one of the FSB’s divisions covering St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region. According to media reports, Gimadiev not only initiated the criminal cases but also lobbied for the appointment of people loyal to him to positions in the regional government, which, in fact, points to a struggle for spheres of influence within this particular region.

Repression under the ‘horizontal’ model is essentially directed against the patron himself, but due to unspoken agreements and bureaucratic ‘unwritten rules,’ he or she is not personally targeted: the blow is dealt to his or her client network, which deprives the patron of his or her support base, status, and administrative clout, intimidates him or her, and forces him or her to either accept a formal ‘promotion’ or lie low. In this context, criminal cases serve less as a tool to fight corruption than to redistribute spheres of influence within a single level of government—between a governor and a security official (as in Leningrad Oblast) or between outgoing and incoming regional leadership teams (as in Krasnoyarsk Krai). At the same time, these crackdowns formally serve several of the regime’s objectives at once: they free up positions for new cronies, give the new leadership an opportunity to attribute accumulated problems to the ‘legacy of their predecessors,’ and simultaneously allow security officials to report progress on their plan to investigate corruption crimes.

The ‘Cleanup’ of Regions — A ‘Vertical Redistribution’

In addition to the ‘horizontal’ redistribution of spheres of influence described in the previous paragraph — where anti-corruption ‘purges’ become a means of power struggles between different factions at the same level — there is also a ‘vertical’ variant of redistribution. This involves the federal center ‘cleansing’ regional political spheres, thereby adjusting the balance of power in line with its own objectives.

These actions have certain specific characteristics: they are carried out (1) by federal law enforcement agencies in regions where (2) the internal political structure is traditionally strongly clan-based (primarily in the national republics), and they target not individual persons but entire groups. They can take the form of a full-scale special law enforcement operation involving several agencies at once (the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Investigative Committee, and the FSB). After being forcibly detained, the suspects are transferred to Moscow, where an investigation is conducted, and a trial begins. Such cases are rare — since the federal government does not often have grounds to ‘restore order’ in the regions — and they generate widespread public attention. At the same time, such crackdowns do not affect ‘untouchable’ regions, such as Chechnya (there is not a single such case in our selection, and the ‘cleansing’ of the region is carried out by Kadyrov’s elite forces).

Several such cases made it into our sample.

In June 2024, Eldar Baychorov, former Deputy Prime Minister and advisor to the Head of the Karachay-Cherkess Republic, was detained during an operation by the republic’s FSB. Later, in April 2025, he was found guilty of fraud. Some media outlets link Baychorov to the clan of former Senator Rauf Arashukov and view his arrest as an aftershock of that high-profile case. However, it is not known for certain whether Baychorov’s criminal prosecution was instigated by federal security agencies or resulted from a power struggle at the regional level.

As for the federal ‘crackdown’ on the Arashukov clan, it began back in January 2019. According to investigators, the senator organized a criminal organization whose members were involved in murders and the theft of natural gas worth more than 4.5 billion rubles. A total of 20 defendants were brought to trial in Moscow, including high-ranking regional officials and security forces personnel, such as the former head of the Republic’s Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Center for Countering Extremism and the former acting head of the regional Investigative Committee office.

Two more cases of this nature occurred in Dagestan in 2018 and 2025.

In January 2018, a large ‘contingent’ of officials from the General Prosecutor’s Office and the central office of the Investigative Committee arrived in Makhachkala. According to them, the purpose of their mission was to ‘verify the state of legality in the republic,’ and the result was more than 70 criminal cases and over 350 identified instances of corruption. The former acting Prime Minister of Dagestan, Abdusamad Gamidov, his deputies, Shamil Isaev and Rayudin Yusufov, and the region’s former Minister of Education, Shahabas Shakhov, were detained. All four were included in our sample, and the Lefortovo District Court of Moscow has already handed down sentences to all four.

In June 2025, FSB officers detained the republic’s Secretary of State, Magomed-Sultan Magomedov. According to some experts, this now-former official and oil magnate is a powerful and influential player in the regional political arena who has taken on the ‘role of a local power broker.’ Although the details of the criminal case are unknown, media reports have indicated that other individuals — Magomedov’s relatives and colleagues — are also implicated. The main allegations by law enforcement authorities relate to the official’s illegal privatization of the former state-owned enterprise ‘Dagnefteprodukt,’ which subsequently came under the control of his large family. To date, law enforcement agencies’ efforts have resulted in the confiscation of facilities at the oil transshipment complex and numerous real estate properties belonging to the Magomedov family, with a total value of over 500 million rubles. In addition, Magomedov’s son was stripped of his seat in the regional parliament.

The Magomedov case is a striking example of how different explanatory models — fiscal re-centralization and vertical redistribution — can intersect in a single case. In this case, the ‘purge’ of an influential regional clan is combined with the state’s process of reclaiming property, and it is difficult to say with certainty which of the two rationales behind the federal authorities’ actions plays the leading role and which is secondary. We have previously shown how the mechanism of anti-corruption confiscations can be used for the purpose of expropriation and redistribution of assets, such as ‘Dagnefteprodukt.’

The federal government resorts to criminal prosecution when other tools for managing the elites no longer work. In regions with a well-established clan structure — primarily in the national republics — a governor appointed from Moscow is, on his or her own, unable to break up local patronage networks. He or she is gradually ‘enveloped’ by the local elite, and resource rents continue to circulate through the old channels. Resignations and transfers do not help here: the departure of one patron does not destroy the network, because a dense infrastructure of connections remains beneath him or her. Financial levers (budget transfers, audits by the Accounts Chamber) are also largely ineffective — because in the national republics, a significant portion of the economy is informal, and budget funds quickly disappear into that same clan-based system.

A criminal case differs from these tools in three ways. First, it physically removes the suspect from the system. Arrest and the transfer of the investigation to another region sever communications, deprive the suspect of the ability to transfer assets, warn allies, or mount a defense. Second, it legitimizes the restructuring: ‘the corrupt official has been detained.’ This is a publicly acceptable explanation for replacing an entire team, one that does not require revealing the true political motive. Third, it seizes assets through confiscation, which provides the financial basis for the restructuring — a fact particularly evident in the Magomedov case, where the main allegations relate not to the bribe itself, but to the privatization of ‘Dagnefteprodukt’ and the transfer of oil transshipment infrastructure into family ownership. In other words, ‘cleaning up the region’ in such cases involves simultaneously dismantling the old elite, returning assets to the state, and clearing the way for a new team. No single administrative or financial tool, on its own, can achieve this result.

Given this logic, continued observation of Dagestan is of particular interest. The republic’s former head, Sergei Melikov, was dismissed on April 30, 2026 — this occurred shortly after the arrest of Magomed-Sultan Magomedov in June 2025 and against the backdrop of massive flooding in the spring of 2026. Putin nominated Fyodor Shchukin — chairman of the Supreme Court of Dagestan—to replace him, and Magomed Ramazanov, deputy plenipotentiary representative in the Far Eastern Federal District and a former law enforcement official, for the post of prime minister. In other words, Melikov himself is unlikely to become a defendant in a criminal case — he is embedded in the federal elite, a military officer with a background as a commander in the National Guard. However, Melikov’s associates — regional deputies, department heads, and those connected to Magomedov through the oil industry — should expect further reshuffles.

Annexed Crimea and the ‘new territories’: establishing federal order

The territories directly affected by the war account for 20% of our dataset — 85 cases: 20 in Crimea and Sevastopol, annexed in 2014; 10 in the territories annexed in 2022 (Kherson Oblast, the ‘LPR’ and ‘DPR,’ Zaporizhzhia Oblast), and 55 in six frontline regions of Russia (Rostov and Voronezh Oblasts, Krasnodar Krai, and Belgorod, Bryansk, and Kursk Oblasts). According to certain indicators, the pattern of persecution in these three zones differs significantly from that occurring ‘behind the front lines.’

The smallest cluster consists of the so-called ‘new territories,’ for which it is still too early to draw conclusions due to the small number of cases — only 10 in our sample, eight of which were initiated in the last two years. Only two verdicts have been handed down, both in the Kherson region: Elvira Vitrenko, Minister of Youth Policy, received a five-year sentence for exceeding one’s authority; Oleg Luchishin, deputy head of the Kherson Regional Department of Industry and Trade, was convicted under the same charge.

Among those implicated are individuals who joined the occupation administration in its first months. They include Denis Petkun, Deputy Chairman of the ‘DPR’ Government; Yulia Mervayeva, First Deputy Minister of Construction of the ‘DPR’; Vadim Ilmiev, Acting Minister of Health of the Kherson region; Alexander Zinchenko, Deputy Governor of the Zaporizhzhia region for Social Policy; and Ekaterina Gubareva, former Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of the unrecognized ‘DPR.’ Half of these cases have been transferred to the Russian capital for review, which demonstrates Moscow’s desire to impose its own rules.

For many years, Crimea served as a showcase of ostensible loyalty to Moscow, and the number of anti-corruption prosecutions there has never been high. In 2018, Vitaly Nakhlupin, deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Crimea (arrested for taking a bribe; he was in charge of the federal program for Crimea’s development), Deputy Minister of Transport Dukorsky, and Deputy Minister of Property and Land Relations Pryamkov were arrested. A second wave followed in 2021, bringing an end to the careers of Minister of Culture Vera Novoselskaya and Minister of Construction Mikhail Khramov.

Most often, the arrests targeted second-tier officials — deputies and department heads. At the same time, the overall picture of criminal prosecution and its timeline in Crimea was almost identical to that emerging across the rest of Russia — a fact that stands out particularly against the backdrop of frontline territories, where, due to the nature of the cases and their political significance, the time between arrest and sentencing has been significantly reduced.

The picture began to change toward the end of 2024 — higher-ranking officials increasingly found themselves in the courtroom. Sergey Sadakliev, head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Republic of Crimea, was arrested in September 2024 on multiple charges, including accepting a bribe on an especially large scale and subsequently disclosing a state secret. In August 2024, Yevgeny Gorlov, Deputy Governor of Sevastopol for Housing and Utilities, was arrested.

According to reports from Radio Free Europe’s Crimean service (January 2026), in August 2025, the FSB conducted its first searches targeting the inner circle of Sergey Aksyonov — the head of Crimea following its annexation by Russia in 2014 and one of the main architects of Moscow’s policy on the peninsula — and his key business partner, Sergey Borodkin. To this end, ‘an FSB team from Moscow with the highest authority’ arrived in Crimea. The protective mechanisms that Aksyonov had been building for ten years (for example, by publicly defending Crimean officials against the security forces and by creating a controversial special commission to ‘protect’ them) ceased to function in 2025. This is a typical example of how the federal government revokes previously granted guarantees while establishing entirely new rules of the game.

Corruption is not viewed here as an inherent element of the system that the authorities can tolerate, but is equated with a crime against the country’s security and image in wartime conditions — against this backdrop, investigation timelines are shortened, the proportion of harsher punishments increases, and federal resources are mobilized to control the situation. This is not the logic of a typical anti-corruption campaign, but rather a tool of military-style discipline.

The Third Objective: Legitimizing the Regime and Shifting Responsibility for Failures

The government is responding to the public’s main demand — the fight against embezzlers — but is now focused on efficiency in the defense sector

One explanatory model for the anti-corruption policy of an authoritarian state is that the fight against corruption is a means of strengthening the government’s legitimacy and demonstrating to the electorate its concern for the public good. This explanatory model also applies to Russia, where the fight against corruption — which aligns with public demands — has long been a central part of the country’s leadership’s public rhetoric. However, one important shift has occurred in this rhetoric: whereas anti-corruption measures were previously justified in official statements on the grounds that corruption harms economic development, since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the government has become increasingly concerned with national defense capabilities.

And although over the past 10 years the frequency of references to corruption in President Putin’s speeches has generally declined, he does not ignore the issue. At the core of his rhetoric are arguments that corruption is by no means unique to Russia but rather a serious obstacle to the country’s economic development. Over time, the emphasis has shifted only slightly, reflecting the current context. For example, in 2007, speaking at a meeting of the FSB collegium, Putin stated that ‘the business climate in the country must be reliably protected from corruption and economic crimes.’

By 2025, he was already giving law enforcement agencies direct instructions to combat corruption in specific areas: ‘Particular attention should be paid to preventing attempts to embezzle budget funds in the execution of state defense contracts, national projects, and our other programs.’

Among law enforcement leaders, the most prominent and frequent speakers on corruption are the Prosecutor General and the Chairman of the Investigative Committee. They discuss the results of the fight against corruption in both official reports and conversations with journalists. It has become standard practice for both officials to give in-depth thematic interviews timed to coincide with December 9 — International Anti-Corruption Day.

The rhetoric of law enforcement leaders may vary in form, but it contains two recurring substantive elements: (1) statements about the negative impact of corruption and (2) reports on successes in combating it. As in the President’s speeches, a shift in emphasis is evident in 2026, from the economic consequences of corruption to the damage it causes to the country’s defense capabilities.

However, each agency has its own metrics for measuring the success of the fight against corruption. While Alexander Bastrykin reports on the number of corruption-related criminal cases initiated, investigated, and referred to court, the Prosecutor General reports on the number of violations identified, prosecutorial actions taken, and criminal cases initiated based on prosecutorial materials, as well as the value of confiscated property.

Prosecutor General Gutsan views the latter figure as a key indicator of his agency’s effectiveness in the eyes of the public: ‘People don’t need meetings, seminars, and the like; they need real results. Not media hype, but concrete, tangible outcomes — restored rights, assets recovered as state revenue, or returned to their rightful owners. This is precisely the measure of our work in the fight against corruption.’

The Prosecutor General sees the need to publicly demonstrate the results of the fight against corruption as stemming from the urgency of the problem: ‘Right now, the public is reacting particularly strongly to embezzlement and the corruption of some officials.’

In Russia, public opinion polls on attitudes toward corruption are conducted regularly by both pro-government and independent research agencies. These surveys show that, according to Russians, corruption in the country is widespread, and the majority believe it is impossible to eradicate it completely.

At the same time, the Russian authorities know from experience that a negative reaction from the active segment of the population can even lead to mass protests. That is why it is sometimes necessary to issue statements at the highest levels and air explanatory video segments on major television channels, as was the case following Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation’s investigation into ‘Putin’s Palace.’

When it comes to corruption at the grassroots level of government, the primary response is criminal prosecution. Healthcare, education, housing and utilities, and road infrastructure are the areas closest to the lives of most of the country’s residents. Fraud involving social housing, embezzlement during the construction of vital infrastructure (hospitals, schools, etc.), heating system failures in winter, and misappropriated funds for road repairs can all cause serious social tension. And so the state is forced to respond — albeit in a symbolic manner — including, and even primarily, through repression. This is a way to demonstrate its responsibility and control over the situation, to stabilize the population’s wavering loyalty, to give the public the response they expect to bureaucratic arbitrariness — and thereby to strengthen its legitimacy.

A striking example is Alexander Samarin, the former Minister of Energy of the Moscow Region. During the 2024 New Year’s holidays, a major accident occurred in Podolsk, near Moscow, leaving more than 170 residential buildings without heat. The governor personally reported on the measures taken to President Putin, press secretary Peskov issued statements, and reports on the situation aired on major television channels. Under these circumstances, the Chairman of the Investigative Committee ordered the opening of a criminal case; the deputy head of the local administration, the boiler room manager, and the CEO of the company responsible for the heating system facility were detained.

However, a higher-ranking figure later emerged in the case, and it is he who made it into our selection. In April 2024, a court placed Alexander Samarin, the former Minister of Energy of the Moscow Region, under house arrest. Earlier, back in late January, he had been transferred from his ministerial post to the position of advisor to the governor. He is accused of abuse of office for failing to ensure proper oversight of preparations for the heating season. On March 13, 2026, he was sentenced, though the details of the sentence remain unknown.

It is worth noting that the logic of repression aimed at strengthening the authorities' legitimacy readily aligns with other rationales. A public scandal is used both to improve the performance metrics of law enforcement agencies, as a good pretext for striking a blow in the struggle for spheres of influence, and as an exemplary disciplinary measure.

In the literature, this strategy is described as the search for ‘scapegoats,’ which involves concentrating responsibility on individual persons while preserving the institutional stability of higher levels of government (Sirotkina and Zavadskaya 2020). Following this logic, those who are made scapegoats and targeted for punishment are typically found at lower levels of management — among direct operatives, technical specialists, and representatives of supervisory bodies.

Frontline Regions: Stress Test Failed

Public dissatisfaction with government officials is most evident against the backdrop of social upheaval and emergencies. At such times, the public tends to demand the heads of those politicians whose inaction or negligence led to the disaster. And frontline regions are a striking example of this.

Forty-seven of the 55 arrests of officials in the frontline cluster occurred after 2023; moreover, in half of the regions — Bryansk Oblast, Krasnodar Krai, and Kursk Oblast — there had been no high-profile corruption cases involving top-level regional officials prior to 2023.

Behind these statistics lies a body of cases directly linked to Russia’s military operations against Ukraine and the need to defend border regions. For example, between 2022 and 2024, the border region of Kursk Oblast received 19.4 billion rubles in budget funds, while Belgorod Oblast received 19.5 billion rubles for the construction of fortifications in case of an invasion. Part of these funds was embezzled, which enabled officials to shift the blame for the military’s failure to adequately protect the regions and for the success of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ offensive against the Kursk Region. The combination of stress and the need to find scapegoats led to the so-called ‘fortification case,’ in which the first verdicts were handed down by 2025–2026.

In the Belgorod Region, criminal cases were opened against Deputy Governors Rustem Zainullin and Vladimir Bazarov, as well as former Deputy Minister of Construction Vladimir Gubarev. In the Bryansk Region, Deputy Governor Nikolai Simonenko was detained in connection with a case involving abuse of authority during the construction of defensive structures. Meanwhile, in the Kursk Region, Governor Alexei Smirnov and his first deputy, Alexei Dedov, were arrested on charges of fraud related to the construction of fortifications; according to unofficial reports, their testimony regarding the possible involvement of former Governor Roman Starovoit in the embezzlement may have been one of the reasons for his suicide.

In the Bryansk Region, cases are currently underway against five deputy governors: Kuleshova, Egorova, Petrochenko, Timoshenko, and Simonenko. This is the largest series of cases against a single governor’s team in the sample. In the Krasnodar Territory, two deputy governors have been arrested — one responsible for construction and the other for ‘Cossack affairs.’ In the Belgorod Region, the former deputy governor for housing and utilities, Polezhaev, and the deputy minister of housing and utilities, Novikova, have been arrested. All these cases make the construction, housing, and utilities sector one of the most corruption-prone in the frontline zone: it accounts for 22% of all the cases we studied (compared to 13% ‘behind the front lines’).

In the border region, 95% of those convicted of corruption receive actual prison terms — almost without exception (by comparison, in the rear, the figure is 79%). Although not many defendants have received their sentences yet (n=20), the proportion already appears stable. It indicates that the system has no intention of forgiving blatant corruption in a sector that is so sensitive and crucial to the political image.

Criminal Cases — A Reflection and Consequence of Triggering Events

Events that resonate with the public (including wars, natural and man-made disasters, utility accidents, terrorist acts, etc.) can serve as significant stress tests for the state, creating potential risks of a political crisis.

Such a crisis is typically described in terms of 1) a ‘crisis of rationality,’ when the state proves unable to effectively resolve emerging problems, and 2) a ‘crisis of legitimacy’ — a decline in public support and a loss of trust in the government. In situations involving external shocks, these dimensions can reinforce one another: ineffective crisis management can accelerate the erosion of trust, which, in turn, limits the state’s capacity for governance. All of this compels the authorities to seek a demonstrative solution to the problem, including through coercive and repressive methods. However, this logic has been described by theorists in the context of democracies.

Of course, in an autocratic regime — and even more so under wartime conditions—the dynamics of this crisis operate differently. Authoritarian governments do not need electoral trust in its classical sense — but they do need it in two other forms. First, sustained popular support signals to elites the system’s stability and safeguards against the coordination of opposition factions: in wartime, rifts within the elite, fueled by a decline in public trust, pose a greater risk than any election.

Second, the ‘crisis of rationality’ in a military context becomes literal: corruption in defense procurement is not abstract mismanagement, but direct losses on the front lines, the disruption of mobilization plans, and the unpreparedness of military equipment. Finally, even in a system where electoral politics are suppressed, there exists an ‘informational electorate’ — the audience of state media — to whom the high-profile arrests of corrupt officials are presented as proof that the authorities ‘have the situation under control’ and are punishing those responsible for military failures. It is precisely at this intersection of administrative necessity and symbolic politics that the logic behind the repressive response to the crisis should be sought.

Here we find the convergence of several of the explanatory models listed above. Corrupt officials, who serve as scapegoats and are most often one level lower in the power hierarchy (regional administrators, second-tier officials), fulfill several purposes at once: prosecuting them temporarily alleviates public pressure and creates the appearance of control over the crisis, satisfies the public’s demand for justice, and motivates other officials to better safeguard their own spheres of influence.

As a result, a scapegoat is designated for the crisis, shifting responsibility from the systemic level to the individuals involved. In this way, the system passes a stress test while remaining untainted, and designates someone to answer for the consequences — even if this is done merely for show and does not lead to the actual eradication of corrupt practices.

Such high-profile cases and the targeted arrests that result from them make it possible to test the limits of personalized accountability: whether it is confined primarily to the municipal level or can extend to regional political elites. Among such incidents is the case related to the aftermath of the 2018 fire at the ‘Winter Cherry’ shopping mall in Kemerovo, which resulted in the conviction of Alexander Mamontov, head of the Kemerovo Region branch of the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations, for negligence and embezzlement; as well as the criminal case related to a utility accident in Podolsk in 2024, following which Alexander Samarin, the Minister of Energy of the Moscow Region, was held accountable. Such regional cases, linked to accidents, disasters, elections, and other high-profile events, explain the regional spikes but not the increase in arrests that began in 2023.

According to our data, Russian authorities often resort to such crisis management methods amid external military and political instability.

Conclusions and Outlook

Three Objectives — and How They Are Being Addressed in Practice

The anti-corruption campaign unfolding in Russia since 2023 is neither a fight against corruption in the strict sense nor an extraordinary purge of elites in the spirit of the Stalinist era. It is a wartime governance tool that simultaneously addresses three challenges the regime can no longer handle with its previous methods.

The first objective is oversight and fiscal re-centralization. The war has laid bare the scale of corruption schemes in areas where they were previously politically tolerated: defense construction, military procurement, and the allocation of infrastructure budgets. Belousov’s appointment to the Ministry of Defense, along with a series of cases against deputy ministers and heads of military agencies, indicates that the regime has shifted to a punitive model of corruption control precisely where theft directly translates into losses on the front lines.

The second objective is managing competition among elite factions. Criminal prosecution has become a convenient tool for purging patronage networks without forcing the patrons themselves to resign or discrediting them. This mechanism operates on several levels: at the top — through the dismantling of entire clan structures, as in the case of the Ministry of Defense and the Shoigu clan; in the regions — through ‘vertical’ redistribution, where repression targets the governor’s protégés and appointees without affecting the governor himself, and ‘horizontal’ redistribution, which involves competition between elite groups at the same level; finally, through the gradual ‘alignment’ of annexed territories with nationwide rules of the game, as the immunity of their top leaders weakens. In all these cases, the regime physically removes people from the system, legitimizes the redistribution through the narrative of the fight against corruption, and seizes assets without creating public political conflict.

The third objective is to legitimize the regime. Show trials function as a relatively ‘inexpensive’ mechanism for redistributing symbolic responsibility: the system designates guilty perpetrators, absolves itself of blame for systemic failures, and demonstrates its intention to ‘keep the situation under control’ — especially in cases related to high-profile events.

Why Did This Surge Occur Specifically Starting in 2023 — and Why Not Earlier?

The main cause that led to criminal cases against officials becoming an increasingly frequent occurrence was the full-scale invasion’s transition into a protracted war of attrition. The war has reshaped virtually all spheres of government operations and shifted the priorities of criminal policy.

However, the date of February 24, 2022, did not automatically trigger the wave of repression: the Kremlin entered the war expecting a lightning-fast campaign, during which the previous methods of managing the elites would remain effective. The turning point came in the fall of 2022 — with military setbacks, a ‘partial mobilization,’ and the strategic acknowledgment that the war was dragging on. It was precisely the transition to a protracted war that required a restructuring of the entire state apparatus: the mobilization economy, logistical support, bureaucratic discipline, and control over defense spending. The anti-corruption campaign became one of the main tools of this restructuring of the rear.

But why are we seeing a surge in cases against non-military officials only in 2023, rather than immediately after the invasion began? This one-year lag between the start of the war and the emergence of the surge in criminal cases can be explained as a natural consequence of the launch of the law enforcement mechanism following the trigger point (fall 2022): assigning new tasks, conducting an operational investigation into a criminal incident or a specific official who may have been ‘targeted’ by colleagues, legalizing operational materials, initiating a case, conducting an investigation, and holding a trial — all of this takes time. This observation is also confirmed by a sociologist specializing in the study of the Russian law enforcement system, who spoke with us on condition of anonymity. Internal turmoil within the security apparatus may also be prolonging this lag. The Russian law enforcement and administrative system is too bureaucratic for requests, responses, and approvals to proceed without a specific political directive. All of this, according to the sociologist, requires a minimum interval of 6 to 12 months between the trigger event and the arrest or trial.

The same logic most likely applied to the purges in the Ministry of Defense: if the wave of repression began in 2024, it makes more sense to look for the reasons for its onset not in the arrival of a new minister — after all, it takes time for the law enforcement machine to get up to speed, and in that case the peak of arrests would not have coincided with his appointment — but in the events that took place in 2023. Perhaps the Kremlin made a decision regarding the Shoigu clan, or perhaps the pace of the purges was influenced by other events, such as Prigozhin’s mutiny, sabotage incursions along the border, or a series of tactical and forced retreats by the Russian army.

Weighing the Pros and Cons: What the Campaign Brings to the Regime — and What Risks It Poses

From the perspective of the regime’s stability, the anti-corruption campaign appears effective: it addresses immediate administrative challenges (discipline in military procurement, reallocation of budget funds, and a demonstration of control) at a relatively low short-term cost. A corruption charge is the ideal weapon of authoritarian rule: it is legally indisputable in Russian courts, morally irrefutable in the public sphere, and requires no political justification. At the same time, despite the rising number of cases, this weapon is used very rarely — the risk of criminal prosecution for an official is only about 2%.

However, the risks of destabilization are real — and they appear to be beginning to materialize. First, the expansion of the zone of repressive risk alters officials’ incentives: in a situation where a criminal case could affect anyone, it is rational either to make no decisions at all (thus avoiding liability) or to rapidly maximize personal income while the opportunity remains. Both behaviors have a detrimental effect on governance practices during wartime.

Second, the possibility of ‘setting up’ colleagues — inherent in the bureaucratic logic of operational investigations — encourages an informant culture and paranoid fear within the bureaucracy and undermines the coordination required to wage war.

Third, high-profile arrests without structural reforms merely reproduce the very system they are ostensibly attacking: new teams replacing those who have been purged replicate the same practices, only with new beneficiaries.

Finally, aggregate data on median prison terms indicate that punishment for most corrupt officials has not become harsher — it has merely come to affect more people. In other words, sentencing practices have largely remained the same. The campaign is characterized by its scale rather than its severity, which in itself signals that the goal is to send a political message rather than to genuinely eradicate corruption. In isolated cases, the state resorts to repeat convictions, but these affect only certain political actors.

Scenarios: How the Situation Might Develop

The observed dynamics can be extrapolated into three plausible scenarios, each of which could affect the regime’s stability, the quality of governance, and Russia’s military potential in different ways.

Scenario 1: Further expansion of the anti-corruption campaign. Under this scenario, the number of cases continues to rise, spreading to new sectors and higher levels of the hierarchy. It unfolds against the backdrop of an ongoing war with no clear military successes and mounting pressure on military spending. For the regime, this is beneficial in the short term, as a constant source of signals that it is in control. However, it is detrimental to the quality of governance: the bureaucratic apparatus enters a state of complete paralysis of initiative, coordination costs rise, and military logistics deteriorate precisely at the moment when the war demands, on the contrary, speed and flexibility.

Scenario 2: Stabilization at a new equilibrium. The regime has achieved a rough balance between the disciplining effect and the functional losses resulting from excessive fear. The number of cases stabilizes at the 2024–2025 level. This is the most likely short-term scenario, assuming relative stability on the front lines and in the economy. It does not resolve any structural problems, but it maintains the regime’s momentum.

Scenario 3: Winding down the campaign. The authorities acknowledge that the campaign has gone too far and ease the pressure, due to a shortage of personnel, signs of administrative paralysis in key agencies, or the end of the war’s active phase. This scenario improves the short-term quality of governance but creates a new risk: officials who have worked for years under the threat of imprisonment may interpret the easing of pressure as a signal to embark on a new round of rent-seeking. At the same time, this scenario is the least likely — the regime cannot back down without a radical restructuring of the system and the dismantling of the power hierarchy.

None of the scenarios envisages the actual eradication of systemic corruption—this is neither the goal nor a possible outcome of the campaign. The campaign addresses military-political objectives using the tools of criminal law, and its logic is subordinated to these objectives rather than to the rule of law or to improving the quality of governance. This is the main paradox of governance under late Putinism: a system that structurally fosters corruption uses anti-corruption charges as an instrument of lawfare to perpetuate itself.