Russian soldiers at home have been killing, maiming, raping and looting at record rates since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Moscow’s garrison military courts have seen a more than tenfold increase in murder cases involving servicemen in the past few years.
They received 729 such cases between 2022 and 2025, compared to just 67 in the four years before the war, according to the data reviewed by Vot Tak, a Warsaw-based Russian-language outlet .
The Russian armed forces expanded by just one-and-a-half times in the same period.
The number of murders also appears to be increasing year-on-year. In 2025, the total sum was one-and-a-half times more than in 2024 and 16 times more than in the first year of the full-scale war.
Almost three quarters of murder cases were committed while the perpetrator was intoxicated, according to Vot Tak.
In one case from January this year, a serviceman named Roman Michurin, who had returned from Ukraine after suffering an injury, kidnapped a woman from a domestic crisis shelter and demanded a ransom of beer and cigarettes to his apartment before strangling her to death.
Roman Michurin kidnapped a woman from a domestic crisis shelter and murdered her after he returned from the front – Odnoklassniki
Alexander Sobolev, the head of the shelter, subsequently condemned “psychopaths, rapists and murderers using the special military operation [the Kremlin’s euphemism for the war] as a cover” to commit “terrible acts with a sense of impunity”.
Russian authorities have attempted to conceal the scale of the issue.
In another case, a senior warrant officer killed a fellow soldier while he opened fire on his own unit in a drunken rage. The victim was commemorated on billboards and in posts that stated he had died in battle with Ukraine.
Cases where soldiers killed their fellow servicemen were rare. They accounted for just 17 per cent of the total. In the remaining cases, soldiers turned their guns, knives and hands on civilians.
Sexual violence committed by soldiers also climbed sharply. Between 2022 and 2025, courts reviewed 549 cases of rape and other forms of sexual assault. At least 312 involved minors and almost 250 involved young children under the age of 14. 2025 alone saw 248 cases, making it a record year.
In September 2025, 32-year-old Alexei Chumachenko abducted a nine-year-old girl, sexually abused and then brutally murdered her. He had reportedly fled from his unit in Ukraine in 2024 and been sheltered from the military authorities by the child’s grandmother for a year.
Cases of robbery and looting, too, have seen distinct increases. 659 cases of robbery and armed robbery involving servicemen were filed from 2022 to the end of 2025. The real figure is likely to be many times higher, since looting in conflict zones and border regions rarely result in court cases or prosecutions.
The authors of the report caution that the real figures are likely to be far higher than the available data shows. Court records do not account for cases still being investigated and former soldiers are not included in the data.
There is also almost no data available from the occupied territories of Ukraine, where Russian soldiers are likely to feel an even greater sense of impunity in pillaging and committing violent and sexual crimes.
Russia routinely sends men convicted of murder and rape to join the ranks of its marauding army in Ukraine. In October 2025, 49-year-old Alexander Gook, who murdered a 42-year-old mother and her six-year-old child before throwing the bodies into landfill, was released from custody after signing a contract with Russia’s ministry of defence.
In December 2025, 56-year-old Rafis Khuzin was similarly allowed to sign a contract to escape imprisonment after he murdered his wife Olga and skinned and dismembered her body.
