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Russia Removes Key Economic Data From Public Access, Ukraine Intelligence Says
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The Russian Federation has withdrawn a range of key economic indicators from public access, a move that Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service says signals efforts to conceal the true state of the country’s economy amid the ongoing war against Ukraine.
According to the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine (SZRU) on February 18, the rollback affects dozens of statistical categories previously available through official publications and databases.
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“A systematic rollback of access to official statistics is underway in Russia, pointing to a deliberate concealment of the true condition of the economy amid the full-scale war against Ukraine. By the end of 2025, 168 tables were removed or reduced in statistical yearbooks, and 115 indicators on EMISS (the Unified Interdepartmental Information and Statistical System) stopped being updated,” the statement read.
The service stated that the removed or no longer updated materials include key data such as household income and expenditures, salaries of doctors and teachers, the number of civil servants, social payments, and demographic indicators.
Ukrainian intelligence highlighted the suspension of results from the “sample survey of household budgets” as particularly significant. These figures had provided insight into how much Russian households spend on food, utilities, medicine, and other basic needs.
Statistics on the number and salaries of state and municipal employees have reportedly been fully closed. Data on wages for doctors, nurses, teachers, lecturers, researchers, and cultural workers are also no longer being updated. In place of current figures, the label “temporarily closed” now appears — wording that, according to the service, is increasingly used to mask sensitive information.
Against the backdrop of rising military expenditures, the Foreign Intelligence Service said the changes appear aimed at obscuring stagnation and declining incomes in the civilian sector.
Additional datasets removed from open access include figures on the number of combat participants, funeral payments, juvenile crime rates, and the number of convicted individuals.
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A substantial share of the discontinued indicators also concerns foreign trade, including exports and imports. As the intelligence service noted, for a country under unprecedented sanctions and heavily reliant on a war economy, such information is critical. Its concealment, the agency said, suggests reluctance to reveal the scale of structural problems, falling investment, and constrained export markets.
Earlier, it was reported that Russia is becoming a less appealing destination for migrants from both neighboring and more distant countries. In 2025, around 26,700 people moved to Russia under the state-backed compatriot resettlement program, nearly 16% fewer than the previous year.
This marks the lowest figure since 2010, when 13,000 people relocated through the scheme, and is almost three times lower than in 2021, before the full-scale war against Ukraine, when 78,500 people resettled in Russia under the program.
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