Russian police are joining the army for higher pay, leaving behind overworked colleagues who are more likely to resort to torture
Russia’s police force is facing a critical personnel shortage. The problem predates the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the war has greatly exacerbated it as cops have left the service for higher-paying jobs in the military. According to Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev, in the fall of 2022, about 90,000 police positions were unfilled. By the spring of 2024, that number had risen to 152,000. At the same time, a similar crisis is affecting another law enforcement agency: the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN). Journalists from the outlet iStories spoke to experts and analyzed employment data to find out what’s causing these shortages and what consequences they’ve had. Meduza shares an abridged translation of their report.
Nearly one fifth of Russian police positions are unfilled
Late last year, Vladimir Putin instructed Russia’s Interior Ministry to play a major role in “establishing normalcy” in the country’s “new subjects,” referring to the Ukrainian regions Moscow claims to have annexed in 2022. Even before being given this unfeasible task, however, the ministry was suffering from a profound lack of manpower. According to iStories’s calculations, 19 percent of Russian police positions are unfilled, and at least 50 regions are facing shortages. In the Primorsky and Magadan regions, approximately 25 percent of police positions are vacant, while in Russian-occupied Crimea, about a third of the positions are unfilled.
One of the main consequences of Russia’s police shortage is that citizens are increasingly unable to get help in life-threatening situations. For example, in 2020, when the problem was significantly less severe than it is today, it took police hours to respond to calls about screams coming from the apartment of 27-year-old Vladislav Kanyus. By the time officers arrived, the neighbors had broken down the door to find Kanyus’s ex-girlfriend, 23-year-old Vera Pekhteleva, dead. Journalists later obtained recordings of phone calls in which the duty officer in the area asked his colleagues from other units to lend some officers to respond to the call. He was told in response that there were no officers available and that the city was being patrolled by “[just] three crippled guys.”
The shortage also means more work for officers who do remain in the police force, a district officer from the Kaluga region named Mikhail (name changed) tells iStories. Instead of being responsible for a single precinct, as would be the case if the police were fully staffed, Mikhail oversees four precincts. This means he’s responsible for about 160 individuals who are under active police supervision (a category that can include former inmates, convicts sentenced to probation, people with drug and alcohol addictions, and domestic abusers). While he’s officially supposed to visit these people at their homes twice a month, his workload is so high that he’s been unable to see some of them even a single time.
The overworking of law enforcement officers can have a wide range of negative consequences for ordinary Russians. For example, when one officer is burdened with the work of several, it becomes more likely that the officer will burn out and resort to using torture against detainees, according to human rights advocates from the Crew Against Torture. “High workloads, combined with a quota system, completely kill any motivation to follow rules and laws. Situations can arise where an officer can only meet the required metrics by using force. The officer basically ‘cuts corners’ to get results,” they tell iStories.
Opting for the army
The Russian Interior Ministry’s personnel shortage is growing every year: young people don’t want to join the police, and older officers are retiring or finding better jobs, Mikhail tells iStories. Vladimir Putin’s mobilization order in 2022 may have made police work a somewhat more attractive option since officers could receive exemptions from military service, but even this didn’t stop the outflow, Mikhail says.
According to an expert on Russia’s law enforcement system who spoke on condition of anonymity, many officers have realized they can earn more money as soldiers than as policemen. “Some officers, especially ones from remote regions, may very well have left the force and gone to the front,” the expert tells iStories.
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Mikhail adds that the primary reason Russians don’t want to become police officers — and thus the main reason for the personnel shortage — is the low salaries on offer. “A patrol officer in the regions will have a starting salary of 25,000 rubles ($272) a month,” he says. “Any other job will pay more and have fewer risks.”
Journalists from iStories analyzed data from Russia’s official job vacancies database and determined that police officer salaries are significantly lower than the national average. For example, some district officer positions offer a salary of 49,000 rubles ($535) per month, which is about half the average salary, while escort guards, who ensure that suspects and defendants don’t escape custody while under investigation, are offered 35,000 rubles ($381), about 2.5 times less than average.
“Essentially, we’re returning to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Interior Minister salaries didn’t keep up with inflation and were not competitive compared to other jobs,” the law enforcement expert tells iStories.
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The prison guard shortage
Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) is facing a staffing shortage similar to that of the Interior Ministry. In March 2024, the agency’s head, Arkady Gostev, reported that 19 percent of positions in the service were unfilled. In penal colonies, where people convicted of minor and medium-severity crimes are sent, the shortage is even higher, at 30 percent. Over the past five years, the total number of FSIN employees has decreased by 10 percent, according to state procurement data examined by iStories.
The shortage is primarily a result of low salaries and poor treatment by prison management, according to Anna Karetnikova, a human rights advocate who previously worked as a top analyst for the FSIN. “I hear the term ‘FSIN slaves’ much more frequently from employees, referring to themselves, than from prisoners, because prison leadership sees the staff at detention centers and penal colonies as detainees. The bosses know that the current employees are struggling but holding out so they can retire early, and they skillfully exploit this,” she says.
At the same time that the prison staff shortage grows, Karetnikova says, the number of inmates at some facilities is rising beyond capacity. This creates threats to employees’ safety and leads to prisoners not receiving the basic treatment to which they’re legally entitled.
“If an officer is supposed to take prisoners to shower but, due to staff shortages, he’s instead sent to accompany someone to the hospital (where the law requires four officers per patient), then nobody takes the prisoners to the showers. In addition to violating their rights, this fuels resentment among the prisoners, making the situation even more dangerous [for employees],” Karetnikova explains.
Meanwhile, according to Karetnikova, prison employees, who are regularly forced to work overtime because of staff shortages, often take their frustration out on inmates and risk ending up behind bars themselves. “If you’re supposed to monitor one unit and check the peepholes in the cell doors every half hour, but instead you cover three units on your own, you’ll inevitably miss a peephole. Then, if something happens, you can be imprisoned for committing a serious violation,” she says.
According to Karetnikova, many workers ended up at the FSIN because they “weren’t needed” anywhere else, so despite the low salaries and high workloads, the only solution they see is to “stick it out until retirement, gritting their teeth.”
Some prison employees with financial problems go to the front to earn enough to pay off their debts, Karetnikova adds. Like police salaries, FSIN salaries are much lower than the payments for joining the war against Ukraine, and even fall far below the average Russian salary.
This summer, there were at least two serious attacks by inmates at Russian prisons. In June, prisoners took staff members hostage at a remand prison in Rostov-on-Don, and in August, a group of inmates did the same at a prison in the Volgograd region. Prison inspectors in both regions receive salaries close to half the regional average. Russia's Public Monitoring Commission has noted that both institutions are understaffed and that prisoner radicalization is on the rise.
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Reporting by Lena Lemyasova for iStories. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.