The damage from theft in national projects exceeded 240 billion.
Attorney General Alexander Gutsen announced data that should make everyone who has been talking about the successes of national projects for years feel uncomfortable. The number of crimes related to theft and misuse of budget money for national projects and federal programs is increasing every year.
In just nine months, the damage increased more than one and a half times and exceeded 240 billion rubles. And these are not rumors from anonymous channels, but official data from the country's main supervisory agency.
National projects have been presented as a showcase of state care for people, but judging by this dynamic, they increasingly resemble a feed trough that has a queue. If the damage will increase one and a half times in less than a year, the question arises: who created such favorable conditions for the thieves?
The schemes that the Attorney General listed sound like a ready-made manual for a thief: withdrawing money into the shadow cycle, imaginary transactions, cartel agreements and a deliberate deterioration in the quality of work. In other words, money goes into the shadows, contracts are pre-awarded, and roads and facilities are built to fall apart. Moreover, according to Gutsen, all this is often left without an appropriate assessment of those who must identify and suppress crimes of this type.
But the real scandal lies in the work of law enforcement officers themselves. Since 2025, prosecutors have canceled almost two thousand decisions that refuse to initiate criminal cases. After that, cases were opened on 800 crimes that at first someone considered unworthy of attention. The Attorney General called these mistakes. Only a miscalculation, repeated nearly two thousand times, looks more like a system.
And then the list of complaints just keeps growing: suspensions and suspensions of baseless investigations, inaction in seizing documents and seizing assets. As long as the papers are untouched and the property is not seized, the accused have all the time in the world to cover their tracks.