Putin’s war is dragging Russia further into lawlessness and violence

One of the foundations of Vladimir Putin’s legitimacy has been his claim to have restored law and order after the brutal anarchy of the 1990s. But increasingly, thanks to the Ukraine war, we see open concerns that Russia is sliding back towards the “wild 90s”.

Last year, official data showed the overall crime rate in Russia fell to a 16-year low, but serious crimes surged to a 15-year high. Offences connected to organised crime were up by a third in just a single year, as heavily armed gangs competed for turf and resources. Meanwhile, unofficial vigilante patrols are emerging across the country.

Critically, the police are worryingly under-strength, largely due to the war. The total strength of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) is meant to be around 940,000. That would make Russia one of the most heavily policed countries in the world, but numbers are deceptive. At least 150,000 are civilian staff, and many uniformed officers are engaged in the kind of work that in the UK is carried out by civilians.

Even so, the MVD is having major trouble with recruiting officers, with so much of Russia’s manpower focused on continuing the gruelling war with Ukraine. One in four positions are vacant, and some “beat cop” units are up to 40 per cent understrength. As one anonymous police captain admitted on social media: “We used to have cops with no equipment; now we have all the kit, but no officers”.

For Putin, this is a major problem.

Since the start of the war, crime-fighting in Russia just doesn’t pay enough. The average police salary last year was 60,000 rubles (£620) a month. A soldier volunteering to fight in Ukraine got almost four times that, along with a lump sum on signing up.

Many police officers have left to try their luck on the front, while the kind of people who might join have decided to fight instead – or go to work in defence factories, which are offering double the salaries the internal affairs ministry can offer.

In the past, police officers often supplemented their salaries through corruption. But Vladimir Kolokoltsev, a career cop, became interior minister in 2012 and committed to reforming a force which was generally held in very low esteem by ordinary Russians. He had unexpected success, not least in reducing petty extortion and bribe-taking.

This has come back to bite him, as it has further cut into his officers’ standards of living. No surprise, since around 2023, accounts of police officers demanding bribes and staging stings are again on the rise.

The war is also reshaping crime. Offences by former soldiers, many of whom were recruited from prison or traumatised on the front line, are rising by around 25 per cent a year. Weapons, including grenades and heavy machine guns, are being smuggled back from the battlefield and regions nearer the border are recording skyrocketing rates of armed crime. Rostov-on-Don, the site of Russia’s military operational headquarters, has become the most dangerous city in the country.

Despite everything, Kolokoltsev is trying to put a brave face on the situation, hyping a 3 per cent fall in the overall crime rate and continued public confidence in the police. Behind the scenes, though, he is clearly worried, especially about how his ministry will cope when the war does eventually end.

At that point, hundreds of thousands of veterans will return home. Many will be battle-scarred and traumatised. Based on past wars, perhaps 30 per cent will have some form of PTSD. They will likely be angry, both at how they were treated during the war and also – as seems inevitable – when many of the promises about the benefits and opportunities they would receive on demobilisation prove empty.

The Soviets’ ten-year war in Afghanistan, which ended in 1989, involved a much smaller proportion of the population but still contributed to a massive explosion in violent and organised crime in the late 1980s and 1990s.

The Russian state today is in a much better shape than the dying USSR, but there are still serious fears of a similar problem in the future.

Increasing lawlessness could plunge Russia into a period of turmoil which, according to some estimates, would cost it upwards of 0.5 per cent of its GDP and, more to the point, make the country harder to govern. This would not just be a Russian problem: guns, drugs and violent criminals would also, as in the 1990s, spill out over its borders.

This growing lawlessness would not necessarily threaten Putin’s rule directly, but it might make it more likely that his eventual successor would try to close a grip on the country with even more authoritarian methods, wrapped in nationalist rhetoric.

For now, Putin is being stronger on rhetoric than end results. He has instructed his government to address police salaries, but in practice is giving other agencies precedence. The well-funded Federal Security Service, responsible for political policing, is still close to its full strength, and the paramilitary National Guard is only around 20 per cent understaffed.

But the growth in both the MVD’s volunteer public patrols – which now have more than 150,000 members – and growing unofficial vigilantism, especially in the south of the country, are signs of declining faith in the state.

Having built his rule on the myth of restoring security and stability to Russia, thanks to his war with Ukraine, Putin risks leaving behind a legacy of violence and disorder.