The head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, announced in an interview with RIA Novosti that investigators have become less likely to ask the court to arrest suspects.
“Preventive measures not related to detention have been increasingly used in recent years five years, their share has increased by 29%,” the agency quotes him. Bastrykin did not name any specific figures related to these mild measures of restraint.
The statement of the head of the Investigative Committee does not agree with the general data for all departments, which is regularly published by the Judicial Department under the Supreme Court. The number of considered applications for the primary choice of a preventive measure in the form of detention is stable and over the past years there have been about 50 thousand such materials in each half of the year.
The difference in numbers can be explained by accounting features. Thus, Bastrykin named specific figures for arrests. “Out of 89.8 thousand suspects, only 15.4 thousand, or 17.1%, were kept in custody during the preliminary investigation,” he said. But in addition to the Investigative Committee, investigators from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB can also request an arrest, so the total amount of materials is much larger.
The number of house arrests has increased slightly in recent years and amounts to about 4.5 thousand every six months. Investigators requested a similar preventive measure in the form of a ban on certain actions only 2,205 times in the first half of 2023. Bail was offered only 35 times in six months.
Thus, even if it was the Investigative Committee that began asking for arrests less often, this cannot be independently verified — the courts do not provide detailed statistics. But the total number of arrests has not exactly decreased.