14 departments of Russia hid their data, some completely

After the invasion of Ukraine, 14 Russian agencies stopped – partially or completely – publishing statistics. At least three departments have removed sections with open data completely. Hiding information from Russians about themselves and about the country was analyzed by the project “If you are accurate”.

Departments began to close their data after the start of the war in order to protect information from “unfriendly countries”, according to the study. They did this even before the law was passed, which allows the government to hide any government statistics.

After the start of the war in Ukraine, sections with data from Rosimushchestvo, Rosmorrechflot and Rossotrudnichestva disappeared from open access. The Prosecutor General’s Office has stopped updating the portal of legal statistics, explaining it by “improving its functionality”, and does not release data even at the request of journalists.

The Federal Treasury of Russia has stopped publishing data on the income and expenditure of the country’s budget. The Central Bank no longer publishes detailed information on international reserves – in particular, information on Russia’s gold and currency reserves has disappeared. Also, the Central Bank allowed banks not to publish accounting reports and hid information about their owners.

The government allowed the participants of the stock market not to publish corporate information. So it tried to reduce the risk for them of falling under sanctions due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In addition, according to the decree of the President of Russia Vladimir Putin, information on the income, expenses and property of officials will no longer be published. The same was allowed to deputies of the State Duma and Federation Council.

The Ministry of Defense has classified data on the registration of benefits for relatives of deceased military personnel. In turn, Rosstat has not provided demographers with detailed statistics on mortality since March 2022, demographer Alexey Raksha says. Because of this, it is impossible to reliably find out the number of Russians who died in the war in Ukraine.

In addition, most of the statistical sets on the websites of the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Sports, the Ministry of Labor, the Ministry of Emergencies, Rospotrebnadzor, Roshydromet and other agencies have not been updated for several years, “Esly byt chnym” found out.