Russia's most senior lawmaker on family policy said on 23 June 2026 that a domestic violence law would frighten men away from marriage, nine years after the state decriminalised first-offence battery.
"Will young people get married if this law is passed? Or will men be afraid, because any touch at home directed at a wife, given the sometimes impulsive statements of our women, could be considered an assault."
Nina Ostanina, chair of the State Duma's committee on Family Protection, Fatherhood, Motherhood and Childhood, said that "any touch at home directed at a wife, given the sometimes impulsive statements of our women, could be considered an assault on physical and psychological wellbeing." If the bill passed, she predicted, "ten out of ten" Russian families would end in divorce.
The statement was the latest iteration of a political argument that has successfully blocked dedicated domestic violence legislation in Russia for more than three decades, while the Russian state continues to treat family battery as a lesser offence than hitting a stranger.
In 2024, UN data showed, 963 women in Russia were killed as a result of domestic violence. Of those, 530 were murdered by intimate partners and 433 by other family members. That figure, 47 per cent of all intentional female homicides, was the highest ratio recorded in 15 years, according to analysis by the independent Russian outlet Important Stories.
The law that governs this violence fines perpetrators the equivalent of a restaurant bill.
The fine that replaced a sentence
From July 2016 to February 2017, domestic battery in Russia was briefly treated as a criminal matter. The State Duma had voted to include family violence in the criminal code, and for six months a first offence of battery against a family member carried the same criminal penalties as a racially motivated assault.
Then Senator Yelena Mizulina, the architect of Russia's 2013 law banning "gay propaganda," led the campaign to reverse the change. The Russian Orthodox Church had called the 2016 criminalisation a measure lacking "moral justification and legal grounds." Conservative lawmakers argued that it was wrong for a parent who hit their child to face harsher penalties than a neighbour who struck a stranger. On 7 February 2017, President Putin signed the amendment into law.
The effect was specific and deliberate. Under Article 6.1.1 of the Code of Administrative Offences, a first offence of domestic battery that does not result in lasting harm became an administrative infraction, punishable by a fine of 5,000 to 30,000 roubles (approximately 80 to 480 US dollars at 2017 rates), administrative arrest of up to 15 days, or compulsory community service of up to 120 hours. Criminal penalties apply only on a second offence within one year: a fine of up to 40,000 roubles, arrest of up to three months, or community service of up to 180 hours. After one year has elapsed, the clock resets. A second beating committed 13 months after the first is treated, again, as a first offence.
The practical consequence is a system that demands victims survive and document repeat violence before the state will treat their abuser as a criminal. It also returned domestic battery to the realm of private prosecution, meaning that victims, not police, are responsible for collecting evidence and initiating a complaint.
Amnesty International called the 2017 amendment "a sickening attempt to further trivialise domestic violence." The Secretary General of the Council of Europe wrote that reducing family battery from a criminal to an administrative offence "would be a clear sign of regression within the Russian Federation and would strike a blow to global efforts to eradicate domestic violence." Russia signed neither the Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women nor any equivalent legislation or treaty.
"Family values"
Russia has no dedicated domestic violence law. Proposals have been submitted to the Duma more than 40 times since 1993. None has passed a first reading. The most recent serious attempt came from the New People party, which introduced a bill in 2024 that would have restored criminal liability for battery against close relatives and family members. In 2025, the Russian government issued a negative review of the proposal. On 19 June 2026, New People lawmaker Ksenia Goryacheva submitted a revised draft to the government for review. As of 23 June, no response had been issued.
The arguments against legislation have remained consistent across three decades. Ostanina's June 2026 statement rehearsed several of them at once: that existing criminal law already covers violence wherever it occurs; that a dedicated law would increase divorce; that it would deter marriage; and that women's own emotional volatility makes criminalisation dangerous for men. This is not a fringe position. It is the official position of the committee responsible for family policy in the Russian parliament.
In April 2024, Ostanina told RFE/RL that there was no need for special domestic violence legislation and offered her assessment of how victims should approach their situation:
"The main method of preventing domestic violence is conscious decision-making when starting a family. Don't chase after a daddy with money but without love."
The Orthodox Church's opposition has been consistent and influential. In 2016, the Church said the criminalisation of family battery constituted an "assault on the Holy Scriptures." According to reporting by the independent outlet Verstka, in 2023 the Kremlin gave the Church assurances that a domestic violence bill would not be adopted.
In 2017, in a speech defending her decriminalisation bill, Mizulina said that criminal responsibility in domestic cases constituted illegitimate state interference in family life, and attributed the domestic violence problem to domestic NGOs seeking foreign funding, part of what she characterised as a Western assault on Russian values and sovereignty.
Putin himself said in 2016 that "unceremonious interference in family matters is unacceptable." Three days later, the Justice Ministry placed ANNA, Russia's most prominent domestic violence support centre, on its register of "foreign agents."
Yes, it's femicide
Femicide is the misogynistic killing of women and girls, a murder committed because the victim is a woman. The term was developed to distinguish killings driven by misogyny from homicide in the general sense. UNODC and UN Women use it to describe women killed by intimate partners or family members as the most extreme end of a continuum of misogyny-based violence, a killing that, in the majority of cases, is preceded by documented earlier abuse.
Russia has no legal definition of femicide. The word does not appear in the Criminal Code, the Administrative Code, the Family Code, or any statute. Russian state officials, police and prosecutors use "domestic murder," "murder of passion," or simply "homicide." The effect is to make the pattern invisible inside the statistics. When a man kills his partner after years of documented beatings, the criminal system records a homicide. The escalation from battery to murder, the logic that connects the 5,000-rouble fine to the body, disappears into a general crime category that contains no information about motive, relationship, or prior violence.
Femicid.net, an independent volunteer project founded in 2019 that monitors media reports, court records and prosecutor's office documents across all 84 Russian regions, has submitted data to the UN Human Rights Committee three times since 2020 precisely because the state does not track this. The project defines femicide as the killing of women by men on the basis of sex-based hatred. Its researchers document cases from news sites, then cross-reference them against investigative committee and court records. They acknowledge the result is a floor, not a ceiling: the real rate, they write, is several times higher than what media and court records capture.
By their figures, in 2019 the femicide rate in Russia's Far East Federal District reached 4 per 100,000 women; in some regions it reached 7. In 2020, one region recorded a rate of 12 per 100,000. For context: UNODC data for 2016 shows Spain at 0.5 per 100,000 and Germany at 1.1. The European average for intimate-partner and family-member femicide, as recorded by UNODC and UN Women in their 2023 global estimates, was 0.6 per 100,000. Russia's high-rate regions exceed that by a factor of seven to 20.
The project's analysis of Russian press coverage of femicide cases found that victim-blaming appeared in 80 out of 282 reports studied; 234 stated or implied there was no history of previous violence; a positive description of the victim's life appeared in just two. This framing (the murder presented as sudden, isolated, without context) is the media reproduction of the same logic the state applies to the law: each incident treated as a discrete event, the pattern rendered invisible.
The numbers Russia does not publish
Official statistics on domestic violence in Russia are incomplete by design. Since 2023, the Prosecutor General's Office has not published crime statistics reports, according to Important Stories. What data exists is disaggregated inconsistently and excludes categories of violence that never enter the criminal system. Because there is no legal category of femicide, there are no official femicide statistics. What follows are the closest available measures.
963 women were killed in domestic violence in Russia in 2024, accounting for 47 per cent of all intentional female homicides that year, the highest proportion in 15 years.
The UN data on intentional homicide provides one measure. In 2024, 963 women were killed in domestic violence, killed by intimate partners or family members in what UNODC and UN Women would classify as intimate-partner and family-member femicide under their global statistical standard. Of those, 530 were killed by intimate partners and 433 by other family members. That figure, 47 per cent of all femicides in Russia that year, was the highest proportion recorded in 15 years, according to Important Stories' analysis of UN data.
In 2022, Prosecutor General's Office data showed 1,311 women killed by family members or partners, a higher figure than the 1,008 Russia reported to the UN for the same year. The discrepancy appears to reflect different counting methods: the Prosecutor General's figures included attempted murders alongside completed homicides, while the UN figure counted only completed intentional homicides.
The Consortium of Women's Non-Governmental Associations published its Algorithme sveta study in late 2024, based on court verdicts for 2022 and 2023. It found that 2,284 women died as a result of domestic violence across those two years: approximately 95 per month, or three per day. In 93 per cent of cases, the perpetrator was a partner. The study found that domestic violence accounted for 66 per cent of women murdered in Russia during those years.
All of these figures are undercounts. A specialist on the Russian judicial system told journalists at Important Stories that the "relationship to the victim" field in criminal case files was routinely left blank until recording practices improved, and that international criminology suggests the domestic proportion of female homicide in a country with Russia's characteristics should approach 70 per cent. Femicid.net's methodology captures only cases that reached public reporting. The Prosecutor General's Office has stopped publishing aggregate crime statistics entirely. The real scale of femicide in Russia is unknown because the state has arranged for it to remain so.
Reported crimes in the formal criminal statistics fell sharply after 2017, from approximately 65,500 family violence crimes recorded in 2016 to 36,000 in 2017. This drop occurred because first-offence battery had ceased to be a criminal offence. It does not reflect a reduction in violence; it reflects a reclassification of it.
A study commissioned by the State Duma itself found that domestic violence occurred in approximately one in ten Russian families. Among those surveyed, 70 per cent reported experiencing or having experienced domestic violence; 80 per cent of them were women. More than 35 per cent of victims said they had not contacted police, citing shame, fear and distrust.
When women call for help
For women who do report, the procedural structure discourages persistence. First-offence battery is an administrative matter, meaning that police have no obligation to investigate. The victim must collect her own evidence (photographs, medical records and witness statements) and file her own complaint. If she lives with the perpetrator, this is often impossible. If she relies on him economically, as many women in Russia do, the consequences of pursuing a complaint fall on the household she shares with him: a fine against him is money taken from the family.
The system has no equivalent to a restraining order that functions at speed. Protection orders exist in principle under civil law, but there is no standalone domestic violence protection legislation to support their practical application, and police have no general power to remove an abuser from the home.
Women's rights lawyer Marii Davtyan has described the administrative track as requiring victims to do "a full-time job" of prosecution, collecting evidence, navigating administrative procedure and attending hearings, while continuing to live with the person who harmed them.
Reported cases that escalate to criminal prosecution under repeat-offence provisions require, structurally, that the victim endure at least one documented instance of violence before the state treats the second as a crime. In cases where the first instance results in more serious harm (broken bones, a concussion, injuries classified under Criminal Code Articles 111 or 112) the criminal track applies from the outset. But the boundary between "minor harm" that triggers only the administrative route and "lasting harm" that triggers criminal prosecution is set by medical examination, leaving police and prosecutors wide discretion in initial classification.
Sergei Kozlov, a former Wagner Group fighter pardoned after service in Ukraine, returned home and beat his 18-year-old partner Daria to death, inflicting 138 separate injuries. An Omsk Oblast court convicted him of murder in September 2024, sentencing him to 19 years' imprisonment. The case was among hundreds documented by Verstka as of February 2025: returning veterans have committed at least 750 severe violent crimes since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, resulting in 378 deaths and 376 severe injuries.
Russia recruited approximately 100,000 prisoners to fight in Ukraine from 2022 onwards, with pardons conditional on completing a military contract. Russian Supreme Court data shows that crimes by current and former military personnel quadrupled between 2021 and 2023. Reintegration support is limited; mental health infrastructure is inadequate; and the impunity many veterans believe they have acquired from their service is, according to victim testimonies documented by Kyiv Independent and Lawfare, explicitly invoked when women report violence to police.
The price of organised absence
Russia had approximately 200 crisis centres for women by 2004, supported substantially by Western donors. After Russia's 2012 "foreign agent" law came into force, the funding model collapsed. Organisations that received money from abroad and engaged in activities classified as political were required to register as foreign agents, a Soviet-era designation that carries serious professional and reputational consequences.
ANNA, the country's first and most prominent domestic violence support organisation, was designated a foreign agent in 2016, shortly after its founder Marina Pisklakova-Parker pushed publicly for stronger domestic violence legislation. Pisklakova-Parker told Time magazine that ultraconservative groups had accused her of working for the USian government.
Nasiliu.net (No to Violence), which handled nearly 8,000 individual cases of domestic violence in 2022 and 2023 and developed Russia's first dedicated mobile application for victims, was designated a foreign agent by the Justice Ministry in December 2020. It closed in October 2025. Founder Anna Rivina wrote in her farewell letter that the organisation would "have turned 10" in November.
Women's Voice in Tomsk, which operated a shelter accommodating eight to nine people, was designated a foreign agent in May 2022. The city administration terminated the lease and seized the premises. As of 2022, Tomsk Oblast, population approximately one million, had no shelter for women fleeing domestic violence and no NGO providing free legal or psychological services to victims.
State funding for domestic violence organisations was cut by 88 per cent between 2019 and 2020, according to the investigative outlet OpenMedia. In 2021, all but one of approximately a dozen domestic violence crisis centres and legal-aid organisations was denied state funding.
Regressive ideology and the weaponization of family
The political resistance to domestic violence legislation is structural within Russian state ideology, not incidental to it. Russia's 2018 rejection of the Istanbul Convention said explicitly that its provisions were inconsistent with "the principal approaches of the Russian Federation to the protection and promotion of traditional moral and family values." The 2020 constitutional amendments, approved by referendum, codified traditional family structures, specifically marriage as between a man and a woman, as constitutional principles, formally subordinating rights derived from international treaties to domestic constitutional provisions.
The demographic crisis accelerated by casualties in Ukraine and emigration since 2022 has made birth rates a central preoccupation of Russian state policy. Opposition to domestic violence legislation has been consistently framed in terms of its supposed threat to family formation. Ostanina's June 2026 statement linking the proposed law to divorce rates and the rejection of the "childfree ideology," a concept Russia effectively criminalised through 2023 legislation restricting content promoting a childfree lifestyle, placed domestic violence protection squarely within the state's demographic politics.
This framing is not evidence-based. Survey data commissioned by the Duma itself found that approximately 90 per cent of Russians, including 95 per cent of women, supported re-criminalising domestic violence. The Kremlin's domestic violence position does not reflect popular opinion. It reflects a coalition of interests: the Orthodox Church, ultraconservative parental organisations and a political class that has chosen to define the family's integrity as something that must be protected from women who report violence, rather than from men who commit it.
Sexual violence
Russia's criminal code nominally covers rape within marriage under Article 131, which defines rape as sexual intercourse by force or threat of force, or when the victim is in a "helpless state." The law does not explicitly exclude spouses, and marital rape has in principle been prosecutable since a Soviet-era Supreme Court clarification was carried forward into the 1996 code.
Between 2022 and 2025, Russia's military courts processed 549 cases of rape and other forms of sexual assault involving servicemen. At least 312 victims were minors; 249 were under the age of 14.
In practice, the Russian Criminal Code does not incorporate consent as a defining element of rape. It requires proof of force, threat of force, or physical helplessness. OHCHR submissions document that this standard diverges significantly from international norms, including the Istanbul Convention's requirement that consent be voluntary and freely given. What the Russian law captures is the most extreme end of the spectrum: physical overpowering or incapacitation. What it does not capture is most of what intimate-partner rape actually looks like: the threat made in private, the coercion through economic dependence, the rape of a woman who submits because she has learned what resistance costs.
Coercion in sexual acts through blackmail or abuse of dependency is separately covered under Article 133, but classified as a substantially less severe crime than rape, carrying lighter penalties. Psychological pressure, threats of harm to children, withdrawal of housing access, threats against immigration status: none of these bring a prosecution under Article 131. Women in these situations who report to police are frequently told that no crime has occurred because they were not physically forced.
In 2022, Russia's Interior Ministry registered 3,311 cases of sexual violence, a figure the Moscow Times reported is widely believed to significantly undercount actual incidence. An analytical study by the Levada Center, Russia's most respected independent polling organisation, found that 91 per cent of Russian married women had experienced domestic violence, which the researchers said often includes sexual violence. The gap between these figures (a few thousand registered cases versus tens of millions of affected women) maps directly onto the legal standard: if force cannot be proved, there is nothing to register.
There is no criminal category for coercive control, stalking or sustained psychological abuse in Russian law. Economic abuse, which includes withholding money and controlling access to employment or housing, has no legal recognition. These absences mean that entire patterns of harm that precede and sustain physical violence are invisible to the law, and that many women who are killed had no legal instrument available to describe what was being done to them before it escalated to battery or murder.
Children and the violence that comes home from war
Before February 2022, Russian Supreme Court data showed the numbers of cases involving "violent acts of a sexual nature" against children were stable or declining. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, they have risen each year. An investigation by the Russian outlet "We Can Explain" (Можем объяснить), based on Supreme Court criminal case statistics, found that the number of such crimes increased by 483 per cent compared to pre-war 2021. The outlet noted it was impossible to establish the exact number of child victims, as many cases go unreported and cases involving veterans rarely reach court and fewer still reach the press.
The Moscow Times reported in June 2026, citing a joint study by the exiled outlet Vyorstka and the University of Helsinki, that nearly 11,000 cases of physical violence against children and teenagers were recorded in Russia in 2023, up 50 per cent from the previous year. After reviewing more than 5,500 criminal cases from 2021 to 2025, the researchers found that at least half involved domestic abuse and that violence most commonly occurred in the home. The most common punishment for violence against a child in Russia is a fine of 5,000 roubles.
The Vot Tak publication, whose findings were reported by the Moscow Times in March 2026, analysed Russian military court judicial statistics from 2018 to 2025. Between 2022 and 2025, Russia's military courts processed 549 cases of rape and other forms of sexual assault involving servicemen. Of those, at least 312 involved minors, including 249 cases where the victim was under the age of 14. In 2025 alone, 248 such cases were filed. The number of rape cases processed by military courts rose from 13 in 2021 to 116 in 2025, an increase of nearly nine times.
Individual cases documented by Russian and Ukrainian independent media establish the pattern. In May 2023, less than a week after his contract expired, former Wagner fighter Sergei Shakhmatov raped two schoolgirls aged 10 and 12 outside their school, threatening them with a pistol and a grenade. A Russian court sentenced him in February 2024 to 17 years in a maximum-security prison colony. In August 2023, Mediazona reported that 35-year-old Wagner fighter Alexei Khlebnikov, freed after a murder sentence when he joined Wagner, raped his 13-year-old niece. In March 2024, ASTRA reported that Andrei Frolov, released to Wagner in 2022 while serving a sentence for rape, murder and car theft, committed sexual assaults on a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old girl in the Kurgan region almost immediately after returning from Ukraine.
In one case reported by Vot Tak from the occupied Donetsk region, a nine-year-old girl was abducted and killed by a serviceman who had previously been convicted of rape and robbery resulting in death and who had been living with the victim's family while evading military authorities.
A 2024 presidential decree signed by Putin exempts active-duty veterans of the war in Ukraine from criminal prosecution, with proceedings suspended and later terminated entirely if the accused is awarded a medal. Veterans who have already returned home can still have the decree's protections applied to influence sentencing: according to Novaya Gazeta Europe, a third of Ukraine war veterans receive more lenient sentences than civilians without war experience. The state's message to children in the communities where these men return is written in the gap between those two facts.
What reformers are asking for
Ksenia Goryacheva's June 2026 bill, submitted to the government for review, proposes restoring criminal liability for battery against close relatives and family members, in effect reversing the core of the 2017 decriminalisation. It does not yet propose a standalone domestic violence law with protection orders, stalking provisions, coercive control offences, or dedicated shelter infrastructure.
Women's rights lawyers and the Consortium of Women's Non-Governmental Associations have called for a dedicated domestic violence law that includes civil protection orders enforceable by police, a definition of domestic violence that encompasses psychological, economic and sexual abuse as well as physical battery, stalking and coercive control offences, and an obligation on the state to fund crisis centres and shelters proportionate to population need.
Russia's obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which it ratified in 2004, requires it to protect women from gender-based violence and ensure legal redress. In 2019, the UN CEDAW committee ruled against Russia in the case of Shema Timagova, a Chechen woman whose husband had attacked her with an axe and whose case a Chechen court had dismissed on the basis that she had "provoked" the attack. CEDAW ordered Russia to pay Timagova compensation and amend its laws to criminalise gender-based violence. The changes were not made.
Following Russia's expulsion from the Council of Europe in March 2022 and its subsequent withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, ECHR jurisdiction over Russia ceased. The last external international legal mechanism with binding force over Russia's domestic violence legal architecture has been removed.
Counterarguments assessed
Opponents of domestic violence legislation make four main arguments. The first is that existing criminal law already covers violence wherever it occurs. This is true in the sense that serious bodily harm, rape and murder are crimes regardless of where they take place. It is not true for the category of battery that covers most documented domestic violence: repeated hitting, bruising and physical harm that does not meet the threshold for Articles 111 or 112 of the Criminal Code. That category was expressly removed from criminal liability in 2017 and placed in the administrative code.
The second is that false accusations will be weaponised against innocent men. No data from Russia or comparable jurisdictions supports the claim that domestic violence reporting is predominantly false. The Duma's own research found that more than 35 per cent of domestic violence victims did not report to police at all, citing fear and shame. Underreporting is the documented problem; overreporting is the hypothetical one.
The third is that the state should not interfere in family life. The same principle, applied consistently, would remove criminal penalties for child abuse, elder abuse and any other violence committed inside a household. The Russian state does not apply it consistently: it retains criminal liability for serious injuries inflicted within families. The argument is applied selectively to battery that produces minor harm, and selectively to women.
The fourth is that domestic violence legislation is a Western import incompatible with Russian values. The original proposals for dedicated domestic violence legislation in Russia were drafted not by foreign-funded NGOs but by Soviet-era women's organisations, constitutional court judges and members of the Investigative Committee. The Duma commissioned research on the scale of the problem, found it extensive, and has repeatedly been presented with that research by its own committees. The information has not been absent. The political will to act on it has been.
The body count
Three women per day, every day, in 2022 and 2023, killed in what every international standard would classify as femicide, in a country where the law has no word for it. An organisation that handled 8,000 cases in two years, now closed. A shelter seized after a foreign agent designation. A government that cut funding for victims' services by 88 per cent in a single year.
The central problem is not a legal gap that the state has not yet found time to fill. The 2017 amendment was deliberate. The sustained blocking of replacement legislation across 30 years, under multiple governments and political configurations, is deliberate. The labelling of victim support organisations as foreign agents is deliberate. The Kremlin's assurances to the Orthodox Church that domestic violence legislation would not pass are deliberate. The refusal to define or track femicide is deliberate.
What the Russian state has constructed is a structure in which the first time a man strikes his partner or his child hard enough to leave bruises, the state's response is a fine, or nothing, if she does not collect the evidence herself. The state has defined that violence as less serious because it happens to women and children inside families, and has organised its political, legal and civil society institutions to keep it that way.
