Russia blocks criminal records as treason cases rise

Russia has blocked online access to court statistics that had shown a wartime jump in treason, espionage and “confidential cooperation” convictions, shutting one of the few public records that let outsiders track politically sensitive prosecutions since the invasion of Ukraine, Semafor reported, citing earlier reporting by Meduza.

The database had helped reporters, lawyers and rights groups follow convictions across Russia over 20 years. Its removal closes off a rare public measure of how often the state has used national-security charges during the war and makes that trend harder to verify independently.

Meduza reported that the archive held about 15 million cards and that its criminal-statistics section disappeared from public view this month. The data covered two decades of convictions and sentences, giving independent journalists a nationwide dataset that Russian authorities do not usually present in one place.

Meduza said a Judicial Department official told the outlet access was no longer being left open online.

«Сейчас всё на уровне руководства согласовывается»

Judicial Department official, via Meduza

The phrase suggests the restriction was approved from above, not made as a routine technical change.

Before the archive disappeared, Meduza said it showed 151 people convicted in the first six months of 2025 on treason, espionage and confidential-cooperation charges. In a separate tally, The Insider reported that rights group Perviy Otdel had counted 468 convictions since the start of 2025 on related accusations. The measures are not identical, but both pointed to a sharp rise in prosecutions tied to contact with foreigners, information leaks and wartime loyalty policing.

That kind of aggregate data matters because many of the underlying cases remain obscure. Individual prosecutions can be dismissed as isolated. A federal database built from court records is harder to wave away.

The archive also allowed comparison with prewar baselines. By removing the historical series instead of merely stopping future updates, authorities made it harder to show how far wartime use of treason and espionage laws has broken from earlier patterns.

Why the data mattered

Independent Russian outlets already piece together the reach of repression from court listings, regional reporting, rights-group tallies and accounts from defense lawyers. The statistics archive reduced some of that guesswork. It gave reporters a single federal dataset against which local reporting could be checked.

A 20-year series also mattered because it stretched across political periods, not just the months since the full-scale war began. When a charge such as treason starts to surge, the central question is whether the pace marks a break from earlier practice. That historical baseline is much harder to test once the archive is offline.

Secrecy around such cases was already visible before the latest restriction. In 2024, Reuters reported that Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was set to stand trial behind closed doors in Russia on espionage charges. The database blackout extends that pattern from individual courtrooms to the statistical record, making it harder to judge whether national-security prosecutions are exceptional or part of a broader campaign.

The result is two layers of opacity. Some trials are closed. The ledger that once showed how often those cases ended in convictions is no longer public either.

That shift carries extra weight for broad charges such as treason, espionage and cooperation with foreign organizations. Since the war began, those laws have taken on more political weight because they can be used to police contact with outside actors as well as alleged leaks of state secrets. Without the historical record, future official claims about the scale of such prosecutions will be harder to test against an independent dataset.

The blackout does not erase the figures already cited by Meduza and The Insider. It does, however, make future scrutiny slower and more fragile. Journalists will have to rely more on cached documents, earlier downloads and case-by-case tracking, a method that is easier for the state to outrun.

Moscow has not given a public explanation for the shutdown or said when access might return. The effect is clear all the same: a database that once showed the aggregate shape of wartime prosecutions has been narrowed just as those prosecutions appear to be rising.