In Russia, there is an ongoing systematic reduction of access to official statistics, indicating a deliberate effort to conceal the true state of the economy amid the full-scale war against Ukraine. At the end of 2025, 168 tables were removed or shortened from statistical collections, and 115 indicators on EMISS (Unified Interdepartmental Information and Statistical System) stopped being updated. These include key data on household income and expenses, salaries of doctors and teachers, the number of civil servants, social benefits, and demographic indicators.
Particularly telling is the effective cessation of publishing results from the “sample survey of household budgets.” These data were essential for understanding how much Russians actually spend on food, utilities, medicine, and basic necessities.
Statistics on the number and salaries of state and municipal employees have been completely closed. Data on the wages of doctors, nurses, teachers, academics, researchers, and cultural workers are not being updated. Instead, the notation “temporarily closed” has appeared—a phrasing increasingly used to mask inconvenient information. Against the backdrop of rising military expenditures, this appears to be an attempt to hide stagnation and declining income in the civilian sector.
Data on the number of combat participants, funeral payments, teenage crime rates, and the prison population have also been removed from open access.
A significant portion of the unupdated indicators also concerns foreign trade—exports and imports. For a country under unprecedented sanctions and dependent on a wartime economy, this is critically important information. Its concealment suggests a reluctance to reveal the depth of structural problems, falling investment, and limited market opportunities.
Taken together, these measures indicate a clear trend: Russia is deliberately reducing transparency to control the information space and minimize public reaction to economic deterioration.
