Counter-elite Repression: How many officials are imprisoned in wartime Russia, and why?

Counter-elite repression as a tool for consolidating power

Repression targeting elites is no less important to the repressive strategies of autocracies than political repression. While the latter is intended to suppress dissent and criticism of the regime, the former is used to discipline elites and ensure their loyalty, both in private business and in the administrative apparatus, increasingly subordinating the latter to the security apparatus.

At the same time, political and ideological purges in the vein of Stalin and Mao have long given way to mechanisms of selective action against corruption and economic crime, as ideology plays a much less significant role in modern autocracies, while corruption plays a much greater one.The fight against corruption in such regimes does not counteract corruption but, on the contrary, the two work in tandem to form a dual mechanism of governance. The combination of corruption and selective anti-corruption enforcement enables a strengthening autocracy to move from ‘horizontal’ corruption from below, involving the capture or privatisation of the state by officials and private business, towards ‘vertical’, top-down controlled corruption. ‘Verticality’ here does not simply mean the transfer of part of the rent upwards (although such practices do occur), but rather indicates the ability to control both the flows of corrupt rent and those who collect it. The transition to vertical corruption took place in Russia in the 2000s and 2010s and was the counterpart of increasing political restrictions (→ Darden: The Integrity of Corrupt States; Rochlitz, Kazun, Yakovlev: Property Rights in Russia after 2009).

The dual mechanism of corruption and selective anti-corruption enforcement makes it possible to (1) preserve corruption as the principal motivation of the bureaucratic elite, encouraging its loyalty as a ‘carrot’; (2) reinforce this loyalty through the threat of ‘deferred punishment’, the ‘stick’; (3) achieve a certain level of administrative effectiveness by keeping corruption within limits where it does not come into open conflict with the regime’s political interests; (4) ensure the rotation of the bureaucratic elite and provide career opportunities for those lower down the hierarchy; and, finally, (5) maintain the low moral standing of the state bureaucracy, strengthening the regime’s personalist character through the image of the ‘just tsar and greedy boyars’.

Throughout the 25 years of Putin’s rule, this dual mechanism of corruption and selective anti-corruption enforcement has remained not merely one of the principal instruments of governance, but also an instrument for consolidating power and transforming the regime itself, through its progressive autocratisation and the accompanying increase in repression. This process can be traced through the history of criminal prosecutions of Russian governors and mayors.

Between 2000 and 2008, 13 governors were implicated in criminal cases (an average of 1.5 cases per year). However, none of these cases resulted in an arrest or an actual prison sentence. At the end of 2004, Putin introduced a reform abolishing direct elections for governors. That same year, several prominent political figures from the ranks of governors became defendants in criminal cases: A. Lisitsyn, K. Titov and D. Ayatskov. They were capable of leading resistance to a reform that was unpopular among both the public and regional elites. None of them was convicted, but the cases became an instrument of pressure, while the broader campaign of criminal cases against governors in the 2000s weakened the authority and independence of a gubernatorial corps that was still politically quite powerful at the time.

From 2009 to 2013, the only figure in this category and the first to be sentenced to a custodial term was the Governor of Tula, V. Dudka (2011). His case was, to some extent, a prototype for the future ‘purges’ in regional administrations and among governors that unfolded on a full scale in 2014–2018. Over five years, 14 regional heads became defendants in criminal cases, an average of almost three cases a year, five of whom were serving governors. With one exception, all received actual prison sentences, averaging 8.5 years. Following the wave of protests in late 2011 and early 2012, Putin was forced to restore gubernatorial elections. However, after the annexation of Crimea, he gained an opportunity to strengthen his power and, through this campaign, turn elections into an entirely nominal mechanism controlled by the Kremlin.

The repressive campaign against governors enabled a radical restructuring of regional government. Against this backdrop, around 85% of sitting governors were replaced (→ Kynev: Governors in Russia), while investigations were under way in a number of regional administrations and governments, developing according to a snowball effect and potentially threatening large numbers of regional officials. Overall, the level of repression against senior officials rose from isolated cases in 2000–2011 to 17 cases a year in 2011–2012 and 36 a year in 2015–2018 (→ Petrov, Rogov: Repressive Practices). It was primarily during this period that regional administrations were largely brought under Moscow’s control, whilst regional elites lost the ability to exert any significant influence over their activities (→ Kynev: Regional Elites in the ‘Special Military Operation’ Era).

Whilst the number of cases against governors increased by one and a half times between 2012 and 2021 compared with 2002–2011, from 12 to 18, criminal cases against mayors followed a more consistent trajectory, with 46 in the first period and 58 in the second. Political scientist Olga Masyutina, who studied these cases, believes that roughly half were prompted by concerns about mayoral performance (performance-driven cases, 48%), while in the other half the underlying cause was conflict between mayors and regional authorities, federal interest groups, or their political positions (→ Masyutina: Politicized Corruption in Authoritarian Multilevel States). At the same time, two peaks in the prosecution of mayors stand out: 2005–2008, immediately after the abolition of gubernatorial elections, and 2015–2018. During these periods, the number of prosecutions reached seven cases a year, compared with an average of four in other years (Figure 1).

These two waves coincided with a sharp decline in the number of cities with elected mayors. Among regional capitals, elected mayors headed 85–90% of cities in the early 2000s, but by early 2012 this had fallen to just over 40%, and by 2019 to only 8%. In all likelihood, even anti-corruption cases that were not linked to conflicts within the ruling elites formed part of a broader political campaign to discredit the institution of elected mayors. Together with the campaign of imprisoning governors, this helped dismantle the relative autonomy of the regions and local government during Putin’s third presidential term.

Figure 1. Criminal prosecutions of Russian governors and mayors of medium-sized and large cities, 2002–2025

Wartime repression: from adaptation to escalation

By the end of the 2010s, the centralisation of regional governance had been completed, and in 2020 the new system of power was effectively entrenched through constitutional amendments. The invasion of Ukraine, which developed into a protracted war, created a fundamentally new context for the transformation of the political regime and its repression of elites.

The Cedar Centre’s report ‘Elite Repression: How and Why Officials Are Being Imprisoned in Wartime Russia’ was the first systematic attempt to analyse changes in the scale and nature of counter-elite repression during the war, drawing on a broad database and an extensive theoretical framework. In parallel, the Re: Russia project also compiled a database of wartime counter-elite repression. Our sample is somewhat broader according to the criteria used (see the note to Figure 1 for details), but is broadly comparable in scale: the Cedar database contains 250 defendants for 2022–2025, while the Re:Russia database contains 265. Our data largely confirms, and in some respects refines, Cedar’s findings.

According to the database compiled by the centre, which covers the upper tier of the executive bureaucracy, criminal cases were opened against approximately 23 officials in the sample each year in 2018–2020. This was, incidentally, below the level recorded in previous years, when, as noted above, an average of around 35 officials a year became defendants in criminal cases. In 2021, repression expanded somewhat, returning to roughly the previous level of 35–36 cases a year. The key phenomenon clearly visible in both databases is the following: while political repression increased markedly immediately after the start of the war, the level of counter-elite repression, by contrast, fell significantly in 2022. It began to rise again only in 2023, reaching slightly above the 2021 level. In 2024, the frequency of new cases more than doubled, and it increased slightly further in 2025 (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Trends in the opening of criminal cases against senior officials according to data from Cedar and Re:Russia, 2021–2025

Cedar’s experts attribute the lull in repression at the start of the war to two factors. First, at this stage the Kremlin, which had not anticipated the ‘special military operation’ developing into a protracted conflict, was occupied with restructuring state administration and the economy to meet the needs of the war. The need for tighter control over the military bureaucracy and the home front became more pressing later. Second, the security apparatus needed time to adapt to its new tasks and prepare a new wave of cases.

While generally agreeing with the argument that the Kremlin was, in a sense, ‘too preoccupied with other things’, we are inclined to view this pause in a slightly broader context. As political scientist Nikolai Petrov noted, in the early stages of the war, personnel decisions in general, apart from those deemed essential, were put ‘on hold’ by the Kremlin, effectively suspending the entire system of routine personnel rotation (→ Petrov: Children, Chaebols and Adjutants). Alexander Kynev identified the same pattern across a broad sample of the regional nomenklatura. Whereas an average of around 13 governors were replaced each year in 2016–2021, the number of rotations fell to five in both 2022 and 2023, while the scale of turnover among the leadership of regional administrations fell from 37% a year to 26%. From mid-2022, the personnel system, in Kynev’s words, ‘all but ground to a halt’ (→ Kynev: A New Start). At the same time, he notes the tension and confusion that prevailed at that time within the ranks of the regional bureaucracy, for whom the war and the political changes that followed its outbreak came as a profound shock.

The period from the beginning of 2022 to mid-2023 should, it seems, be regarded as a distinct phase of the political system’s adaptation to the reality of an unexpectedly protracted war. The Kremlin was preoccupied with the emergency construction of the military machine and the suppression of open political discontent, while facing an acute shortage of manpower and serious problems with the organisation of military command. A striking manifestation of the latter was the public conflict between Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group and the leadership of the Ministry of Defence, which lasted from the summer of 2022 to the summer of 2023 and culminated in the group being brought under the control of the ministry and ‘Prigozhin’s mutiny’. Throughout this period, the Kremlin refrained from making personnel changes and from exerting pressure on the bureaucracy through the mechanism of corruption prosecutions. In our view, this reflected its uncertainty about the stability and loyalty of the state apparatus.

Following the failure of the mutiny and the elimination of Prigozhin, the next stage in the evolution of ‘wartime Putinism’ began. In the second half of 2023, the regime’s position became more stable: unified command in the military was restored, the front stabilised, and state injections into the economy ushered in a period of military-economic boom. In April 2024, the Kremlin successfully held the presidential election. Kynev dates the return to normal levels of rotation in regional administrations to the second half of 2024: from July 2024 to June 2025, the usual 13 governors were replaced, while the level of rotation in regional administrations rose to 32%. It was at this point that the Kremlin overcame its previous ‘confusion and caution’ and moved towards tougher strategies, including almost ‘sweeping purges’ of the administrations in some regions.

The Re:Russia database is broader in scope than the Cedar database according to the criteria used. In addition to federal ministers and their deputies, heads of federal agencies and their deputies, governors, deputy governors, heads of regional governments and their deputies, regional ministers and their deputies, and heads and deputy heads of territorial offices of federal authorities, we also include members of the State Duma and senators, heads and deputy heads of regional legislative assemblies, prosecutors of federal subjects, and mayors of medium-sized and large cities with populations of more than 75,000. At present, the Re:Russia database contains 342 individuals implicated in criminal cases from these groups from the start of 2021 to August 2026. Cases may have been opened either against serving officials or after their resignation; in the latter case, they are also included in the database.

Figure 3. Trends in the opening of criminal cases against senior officials, broken down by half-year, 2021–2026

The data we have compiled for the first half of 2026 is provisional and may still be revised, but at this stage we can identify a slight decline in the rate of cases being brought. There were 35 in total. In the first quarter, the rate was broadly in line with the previous year, at around eight cases a month, but from May it fell sharply. This again resembles a pre-election lull: during preparations for the State Duma elections, the Kremlin was ‘loosening the reins’, above all with regard to the regional administrative apparatus, whose loyalty was needed to ensure high voting results. From January to August 2026, the Re:Russia database contains just 42 cases, compared with 78 in January–August 2025.

Thus, in our interpretation, the divergence between political and counter-elite repression during the first stage of the war was linked to the instability experienced by the political system during this period. 2023 appears to have been a period of stabilisation and a gradual increase in the number of cases, while immediately after the presidential election a new campaign of pressure on the administrative elites began, with the intensity of repression rising to roughly three times the pre-war level recorded in 2021.

A new profile of repression and a thematic repertoire

In addition to the quantitative increase in cases opened against senior officials since 2023, the Cedar report identifies significant changes in their ‘quality’. First, the role of the FSB has become even more prominent: the share of cases involving the security service increased from 76% in 2018 to 90% in 2025. The fundamental shift here had already occurred in the mid-2010s, when the FSB firmly established itself as the organiser and overseer of surveillance and prosecution targeting the managerial elite (→ Petrov, Rogov: The Executive Branch and Security Agencies). Second, the number of arrests following the opening of a case has increased: 47 of the 55 arrests of officials recorded in the Cedar database took place after 2023. At the same time, cases are being processed much more rapidly: the median time from arrest to conviction fell from 40 months in 2018 to 14 months in 2024. This gives the anti-corruption campaign the appearance of an assembly line, amplifying its informational effect. At the same time, prison sentences have not increased substantially: according to Cedar analysts, the median sentence, for example for an especially large bribe, remains around nine years. However, the likelihood of an actual prison sentence has increased: among regional officials, around 80% of defendants have received custodial sentences since 2023, compared with around 95% of federal officials and officials from frontline regions.

Finally, the fiscal component of repression has increased significantly. In cases initiated before 2022, property confiscation was applied in approximately 20% of cases; since 2023, the figure has risen to 31%. Although the change in the proportion is not particularly large, the value of confiscated assets has changed dramatically: the official value of property seized by the state rose from 90 billion roubles in 2022 to 400 billion in 2023 and 1.6 trillion in 2025, according to Cedar analysts. It cannot be ruled out that security officials are deliberately seeking potential targets among officials whose wealth is poorly concealed and whose conviction would generate a greater fiscal return. Cedar separately notes an increase in civil claims by prosecutors seeking the confiscation of property, where the median amount is considerably higher than in criminal confiscation cases: 308 million roubles versus 1.55 million.

This latter change undoubtedly reflects the state’s growing fiscal needs. Against the backdrop of budgetary constraints, the state is seeking to capture the proceeds of corruption: funds returned to the treasury will eventually be stolen again by the successors of those sent to prison, but the cost of forced personnel rotation within the administrative apparatus is thereby reduced. In much the same way, during Stalin’s purges, newly appointed officials moved into the flats and dachas of their repressed predecessors. Overall, however, the qualitative changes identified by Cedar researchers, including the assembly-line processing of cases, the role of the FSB, pre-trial arrests, custodial sentences and confiscations, point to an increase in the regime’s repressiveness. The level of repressiveness is determined not only by quantitative indicators but also by ‘qualitative’ characteristics: tougher procedures and punishments increase the demonstrative effect of repression.This enables modern autocracies to keep a particular target group in a state of fear without resorting to the mass purges practised in the 20th century. This mechanism is widely used both in the sphere of political repression and in counter-elite repression (→ Rogov: The Art of Coercion).

The Re:Russia and Cedar databases point to several ‘streams’, or thematic blocks, within the campaign to expand counter-elite repression in 2024–2025. Following the presidential election, the increase in the number of cases was driven primarily by the middle tier of regional administration, including regional ministers, heads of regional offices of federal agencies and their deputies: 53 defendants in 2024 compared with 34 in 2023 in our database. At the same time, the geographical scope expanded: instead of the 26 regions covered in 2023, criminal cases now extended to 48. In the second half of the year, the status of those targeted rose: the increase was now driven by the ‘regional upper tier’, namely deputy governors and heads of regional governments, with 24 cases compared with 13 in 2023, as well as by ‘federal’ officials. From 20 March to the end of December 2024, 11 criminal cases were opened against former and serving deputy ministers. This is more than in all other periods combined in our ‘wartime’ sample. Only three of them, however, were officials from the Ministry of Defence, where the well-known ‘purge’ unfolded following Shoigu’s departure. The list also includes deputy heads of the Federal Customs Service, the Ministry of Emergency Situations, and the ministries responsible for energy, transport and education. This wave subsided just as abruptly as it emerged: in 2025 and the first half of 2026, we identified only one criminal case at federal level.

Another wave of the 2024–2025 repression campaign began at the end of 2024 and became the central theme of the following year, when virtually all of the increase in cases came from the ‘frontline belt’: Rostov, Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk and Voronezh regions and Krasnodar Krai, as well as the annexed Crimea and Sevastopol and the occupied territories of Ukraine. Here too, the campaign appears to have unfolded in two stages: first regional ministers and their deputies, followed, apparently on the basis of their testimony, by governors and deputy governors. From the second half of 2024 to the first half of 2026, our database records 39 defendants from the ‘frontline belt’, or 51 since the beginning of 2023.

Finally, another theme emerges in the repressive activity of 2025: cases against serving mayors of major cities, some of whom left office literally on the eve of their arrest, including those of Serpukhov, Krasnoyarsk, Vladimir, Stary Oskol, Ivanovo, Ufa and Kaspiysk. These cases are listed in the order in which the criminal proceedings emerged, from February 2025 to June 2026. This is clearly some separate ‘file on Putin’s desk’.

Although the ‘victims’ of the purge at the Ministry of Defence occupy a relatively modest place in the Re:Russia database, with four deputy ministers, three arrested in 2024 and one in 2026, in reality this was the largest and most politicised repressive campaign within the state apparatus. According to Cedar, it involved at least 101 defendants. It resulted in the replacement of 19 of the 70 heads of departments, services and directorates, primarily in finance, construction and logistics. By now, 51 defendants have been convicted, 48 of whom received custodial sentences. The median time from arrest to conviction was 15 months, compared with 21 months for civilian officials, according to the Cedar report.

Overall, as Cedar’s analysts note, based on their wartime sample, the risk of prosecution for senior officials remains low, at 1–3%. Indeed, despite the significant increase in the overall number of prosecutions of senior officials over the past two years, it would be difficult to describe them as ‘mass’ repression. However, if we assess the results of the repressive campaign against the executive apparatus in 2023–2025 and the first half of 2026, they are as follows. Russia has a total of 217 cities with populations of more than 75,000. The Re:Russia database contains 21 mayors with criminal cases during this period, representing 10% of the total number of city heads. Across Russia, Cedar identifies 924 positions within the ‘regional executive elite’, including governors. Our database contains 86 officials in this category, equivalent to 9%. Among governors, the figure is 6% when the late Roman Starovoyt, who died by suicide, is included. These figures can be seen as an indicator of wartime repressive turnover, with the wartime period defined here as beginning once the regime had adapted to the conditions of war.

Although regional ministers and their deputies feature most frequently in the stream of crime news, this is simply a consequence of their large numbers. In reality, the rate of repressive forced turnover among them is practically the same as among the categories mentioned above at 8% (118 individuals out of 1,473 posts). The risk of prosecution is considerably lower for ‘federal’ officials: our database contains just 14 defendants in this category among more than 400 heads and deputy heads of federal ministries and agencies, or just over 3%. This is no coincidence. Both in the 2010s and during the war, the ‘fight against corruption’ in Russia has clearly been skewed towards the regions: the FSB and law enforcement agencies act with far greater confidence within regional administrations. Such a shift is not a purely Russian phenomenon and has previously been documented in the case of China: the central authorities conduct their ‘anti-corruption’ campaigns in the regions with the dual aim of strengthening control over regional elites and shifting the blame for corruption onto them in the eyes of the public, thereby promoting the ideology of centralism and hierarchical accountability (→ Zhai: Anti-Corruption and Political Legitimacy in China).

Wartime counter-elite repression: characteristics and prospects

The aim of anti-corruption campaigns in authoritarian regimes is not to eradicate corruption, but to manage it in ways that consolidate power. As this analysis shows, the ‘anti-corruption’ campaigns of the Putin era have generally been closely linked to the regime’s immediate priorities. Their trajectory also suggests that the degree of pressure exerted on bureaucratic elites depends on how secure the regime feels: at moments of ‘weakness’, this pressure may ease. We also see a clear correlation between repressive campaigns and electoral cycles: regional administrative machines bear primary responsibility for delivering the desired electoral outcome, so coercive pressure on them is reduced during these periods.

The data on repression targeting senior members of the managerial elite collected by Cedar and Re: Russia, together with the analysis presented in the report and this overview, support the following conclusions. The new phase of wartime ‘anti-corruption’ activity, from roughly mid-2023 to the end of 2025, indicates an increase in repressiveness, reflected both in the growing number of cases initiated and in the tightening of their ‘qualitative’ characteristics, including arrests, assembly-line processing and confiscations. In its new wartime phase, Putin’s authoritarian regime has been forced to rely even more heavily on coercion than on citizens’ belief in its relative effectiveness. Political power is consequently continuing to shift from the civilian bureaucracy towards the coercive and security apparatus, while repression is becoming the principal means of communication between the regime, on the one hand, and elites and citizens, on the other.

At the same time, as Cedar analysts note, under wartime conditions the regime seeks to use repressive campaigns to improve the efficiency of public spending, particularly in the military sphere, where this is directly linked to addressing pressing military and political objectives. This was the explicit purpose of two major repressive campaigns in 2024–2025, in the Ministry of Defence and in the ‘frontline belt’.

The repressive campaign within the Ministry of Defence, a purge in an almost classical sense of the word, targeting the ‘Shoigu clan’, in fact pursued two objectives, as the Cedar report rightly notes: shifting responsibility for the failures of the initial stage of the war onto the ministry and taking control of it. The purge was the Kremlin’s response to the accusations levelled at Shoigu and his entourage during Yevgeny Prigozhin’s public conflict with the ministry. As a result, control over the ministry came to be distributed among several groups, including Putin’s trusted associates, FSB veterans, military personnel and technocrats. This institutional configuration is consistent with the objective of improving the efficiency of financial flows, the report’s authors write.

However, it should be noted that the main recipient of budgetary funds allocated for arms production is the Rostec group, which brings together defence-industry enterprises, while the Ministry of Defence acts as the purchaser and recipient of these supplies. Moreover, most of the allegations underpinning criminal cases against ministry officials are unrelated to wartime arms procurement and are instead fairly routine in nature: abuses in the construction of Patriot Park, illegal construction on military land, and procurement of equipment and hygiene products. This selection of charges makes it possible to confine selective anti-corruption investigations to those individuals against whom a ‘political decision’ has been taken to impose demonstrative punishment, namely the Shoigu clan. But it has little bearing on improving efficiency or exposing corruption schemes connected to the principal financial flows.

Much the same can be said of the campaign to prosecute officials in the ‘frontline belt’. New governors and their deputies are appointed through exactly the same procedures and on the same grounds as their predecessors, who have now found themselves behind bars. More importantly, the funds allocated for the construction of fortifications along the border, the embezzlement and misappropriation of which form the basis of most of the ‘frontline’ cases, are not all that substantial at just over 40 billion roubles (19.5 billion for the Belgorod Region and almost the same amount for the Kursk Region). In any event, this is an order of magnitude less than the funds allocated for infrastructure reconstruction and construction in the occupied territories. According to Prime Minister Mishustin, in 2024 alone, 360 billion roubles were allocated to the ‘integration programme’ (the reconstruction of the occupied territories), which ‘made it possible to repair thousands of kilometres of roads and motorways, and to restore or effectively rebuild almost four thousand different facilities’. We estimate that at least 200 billion roubles were allocated in 2023. In other words, the funding allocated for this purpose over two years is approximately 15 times greater than the funding for frontline fortifications. Significantly, the fortification contracts went to local administrations and affiliated firms, which have now found themselves at the centre of the repressive campaign, while the ‘reconstruction’ of the occupied territories was entrusted to major Moscow-based construction holdings. In this sense, the high-profile anti-corruption campaign in the ‘frontline belt’ replicates the same authoritarian strategies of redistributing public attention and responsibility between structures associated with the central authorities and those linked to regional authorities. Thus, even where wartime repression targeting the managerial elite is linked to pressing military and political objectives, it retains the authoritarian design of selective anti-corruption enforcement.

As noted above, the slight reduction in the intensity of counter-elite repression, visible in our data for the first eight months of 2026, may be linked to the parliamentary elections. However, this pause may continue in the near term if the Kremlin decides to launch a new wave of ‘partial mobilisation’. The main burden of organising this process will fall on local administrations, which will also have to bear the brunt of the resulting public discontent. At such moments, pressure on them from above tends to ease. Another factor behind the temporary pause in counter-elite repression may be the rumoured resignation of Sergei Alpatov, head of the FSB’s Economic Security Service, and personnel reshuffles within the agency, or even a restructuring, rumours of which were reported by the publication Important Stories.

Nevertheless, in our view, in the foreseeable future, the political regime of ‘wartime Putinism’ will find itself under strain as a result of mounting economic constraints, the inability to achieve success on the front line, and the bureaucratic elite’s distrust of mobilisation rhetoric and pro-war narratives. Under these conditions, the security factions will seek to prove the effectiveness of coercive methods and suppress the latent resistance of ‘technocrats’. We believe that all this threatens the bureaucratic elites not only with the continuation of high levels of counter-elite repression in the near future, but also with a possible escalation in the form of targeted campaigns designed to make a high-profile, demonstrative impact and to instill fear.