Russian border region sees record spike in sexual violence cases. Is the war to blame?
Russia’s Belogord region saw a record number of reported rapes in 2025 — more than any other Russian region. According to the data project To Be Precise, Belgorod police registered 199 such cases, three times more than the year before.
The independent Russian outlet Verstka noted that the 199 cases recorded in Belgorod represent the region’s highest figure at least since 2008. Reported rape cases in Belgorod rose sharply in 2022 and 2023, dipped in 2024, and then spiked in 2025, according to Interior Ministry data.
Verstka suggested that the sharp increase in 2025 could be linked to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Speaking to the outlet, human rights lawyer Mari Davtyan said the spike is clearly tied to “external circumstances,” but cautioned that the available data is insufficient to draw firm conclusions.
“We can only speculate that this increase may be due, in part, to a rise in the number of men in the area,” Davtyan told Verstka. “A large number of military personnel are currently stationed there. Numerous studies show that levels of violence are higher among military personnel.”
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At the same time, To Be Precise noted that this trend hasn’t been observed in other border regions. “Based on open data, it’s impossible either to confirm or to refute [the claim that the jump is connected to the war],” the project wrote. Researchers added that detailed crime statistics are publicly available only through 2022, conviction data through 2024, and court rulings in cases involving sexual violence are classified.
The project also reported that in 2024, only 14 percent of rape cases registered in Belgorod — nine out of 65 — made it to court. The rest either had not yet reached trial, were suspended, or were dropped during the investigation process. The researchers noted that there is no public information explaining why. In some cases, they added, charges in sexual violence cases may be downgraded to less severe offenses, such as “lewd acts.”
According to the most recent publicly available data from the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office, 82 percent of rape cases in Belgorod in 2022 involved minors. For comparison, that figure stood at 57 percent nationwide.
Crimes involving sexual violence against children have been rising in Belgorod since 2021. Ekaterina Khodzhaeva, a sociologist specializing in police studies, suggests the increase may be tied to changes in law enforcement practices: the standard of proof in such cases is extremely low, and in some instances rape charges are brought over online correspondence with minors.
“Since around 2011–2013, the Investigative Committee’s approach to sexual violence against minors has been fueled by the personal interest of the agency’s leadership and has effectively turned into a box-ticking metric,” Khodzhaeva said.
The law institute affiliated with Belgorod’s Interior Ministry attributes the rise to so-called “multi-episode crimes” — for example, abuse within families that continues for years. In 2023, 66 percent of crimes involving sexual violence against minors in the region were committed by family members; in 2022, according to the Prosecutor General’s Office, the figure was 42 percent.
Whether this pattern persisted in 2025 — and whether children made up the majority of victims in rape cases in the region over the past year — could be determined using data from the Prosecutor General’s Office. But those statistics have been closed to the public since 2023.
