The Supreme Court of Russia hid statistics on military sentences, explaining this by orders from the FSB and the Ministry of Defense on secrecy

Detailed data on sentences passed for crimes against military service (Chapter 33 of the Criminal Code) was removed from the statistics of the Judicial Department at the Supreme Court of Russia, Mediazona noted. Such crimes include, for example, desertion, unauthorized abandonment of a unit and failure to comply with an order.

Since 2014, the department has been publishing summary statistics every six months on the work of the courts and the decisions they make; one of the tables collected data on how many people were convicted or acquitted under each part of each article of the Criminal Code.

In December 2022, Mediazona sent a request to the department to provide information on the number of sentences handed down before 2014. In its response, the judicial department provided the requested data and separately noted that more recent statistics on these articles are regularly published on the department’s website.

Already in January, Mediazona noticed that the tables posted on the website no longer contained detailed data on crimes against military service - this section was simply skipped. When comparing the metadata of the old and new downloaded tables, it is noticeable that the new files were edited on December 12, 2022.

The Judicial Department, in response to Mediazona’s request to explain the disappearance of part of the statistics, said that “the placement of statistical information on the activities of courts and criminal records” is carried out, among other things, in accordance with the order of the Ministry of Defense (it contains a list of 689 points clarifying what data relates to official secret, order issued on January 17, 2022) and the FSB order on information that “if obtained by foreign sources can be used against the security of the Russian Federation” (dated November 4, 2022).

From the data published by the department before the removal of some statistics, it followed that the most popular article among crimes against military service was 337 - unauthorized abandonment of a unit. And the number of sentences on it in 2022 has increased compared to previous ones. “Mediazona” has already said that even before the announcement of mobilization, they began to actively attract military conscientious objectors who did not want to go to Ukraine or return there.