The Russian Federation is experiencing a systematic restriction of access to official economic data. According to the Ukrainian Foreign Intelligence Service, this process is ongoing, and its scale has increased since the end of 2025.
This is reported by Kyiv24
What Data Has Become Unavailable
168 tables have been removed or shortened from Russian statistical collections, and updates have ceased for 115 key indicators in the Unified Interagency Information and Statistical System. In particular, access to information regarding household income and expenditures, salaries of medical workers and educators, the number of civil servants, social payments, and demographic indicators has been restricted. Reports from Ukrainian intelligence indicate that the cessation of the publication of results from the “sample survey of household budgets” is particularly telling, as these previously allowed for an assessment of citizens’ actual spending on essential needs – food, utilities, and medications.
“The actual cessation of the publication of results from the ‘sample survey of household budgets’ is particularly telling. These data allowed for an assessment of how much Russians are actually spending on food, utilities, medications, and basic needs,” the report states.
Reasons for Secrecy and Consequences
The Russian authorities have completely closed data on the number and salaries of state and municipal employees, and have also stopped updating statistics on the wages of doctors, nurses, teachers, researchers, and cultural workers. On many pages, instead of current figures, there is a note stating “temporary closure,” which experts believe appears to be an attempt to conceal stagnation and a decline in income in the civilian sector amid rising military expenditures by the state.
Additionally, information about the number of combat participants, burial payments, statistics on juvenile delinquency, and the number of incarcerated individuals has disappeared from open sources. Data on foreign trade, particularly exports and imports, has also become partially unavailable.
Intelligence officials believe that for a country under unprecedented sanctions, which relies on a military economy, concealing such information is indicative of a reluctance to reveal the depth of structural problems, declining investments, and limited markets for goods.
Based on these actions, experts conclude that the Russian government is deliberately reducing the transparency of economic statistics to control the information space and minimize public resonance amid a worsening economic situation.
It is worth noting that in 2025, for the first time in a long while, some high-ranking officials in Russia publicly spoke about crisis phenomena in the economy. In June, Minister of Economic Development Maxim Reshetnikov stated that “based on the current business sentiment, we seem to be on the brink of entering a recession.”