Around 45% of more than 1,000 executive decrees signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2025 were never made public, according to an analysis by the exiled investigative outlet Vyorstka published Tuesday.
The report found that 449 decrees out of at least 1,010 were classified on the Russian government’s official portal for legal acts last year, marking a 44.5% share.
While this represents a 3.4 percentage point increase over 2024, the level of secrecy remains slightly below the historic peaks seen in the first two years of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Among the 561 decrees that were published, Vyorstka said 52 of them were dedicated to granting honorary designations to specific military units.
The outlet notes that secret decrees are typically used for highly sensitive administrative actions, including military awards to soldiers currently in combat or posthumously, or pardons of convicted prisoners recruited into the military.
In at least one case, BBC’s Russian service reported that Putin had signed a secret decree in 2006 awarding the late Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin awarding him the Medal of the Order “For Merit to the Fatherland” I class.
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