Russia Scrambling To Cope With Mounting Shortage Of Policemen – OpEd
By Paul Goble
Russia is a police state with an unusual problem: it doesn’t have enough policemen to man the front lines. As a result, it is using police from foreign countries, relying on ethnic militias, employing CCTV to track people, and shifting police from one region of the country to another to fill gaps.
Russian policemen have been leaving the service to get higher pay by fighting in Ukraine or joining private security companies, with units in many parts of the country short of staff by as much as a third. And now the problem has become so critical, given rising crime rates, that it has attracted the attention of Vladimir Putin.
The interior ministry began sounding the alarm on this point at the end of last year (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/11/russia-facing-increasingly-serious.html), and now Putin has added his voice to complaints but without any suggestion that he will spend more money on the country’s police force or has any long-term plans (vkrizis.info/vlast/nekomplekt-vnutrennih-del/).
Among the steps the Russian government has taken to dry to deal with this problem without spending more money, something very difficult at a time of budgetary stringency brought on by Putin’s war in Ukraine, are the following:
— Bringing in police from Central Asian countries (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/12/to-cope-with-enormous-shortage-of.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/12/to-cope-with-enormous-shortage-of.html);
— Shifting police from one region to another as needed, including from those dominated by one ethnic group to those dominated by another (fortanga.org/2025/03/otryad-policzii-iz-udmurtii-polgoda-budet-rabotat-na-dorogah-ingushetii/);
— Relying on non-Russian ethnic units as well as on the notorious Black Hundreds-type Russian nationalist Russian Community to perform basic policing functions and engage in crowd control (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/11/spread-of-immigrant-militia-units-in.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/10/another-black-hundreds-group-revived-in.html);
— Turning to the Russian army and other security forces to perform basic police functions (vkrizis.info/vlast/nekomplekt-vnutrennih-del/); and
— Increasingly relying on electronic means such as CCTV to monitor what Russians are doing at lower cost (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/02/another-move-toward-new-totalitarianism.html).
