Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
More than one percent of all pregnant women in the regions test positive, and among men aged 40-50 it’s three times as high.
Across 27 Russian territories, HIV has now become an epidemic officially crossing into the general public, The Moscow Times reports.
Vasily Akimkin, director of the Central Research Institute of Epidemiology at consumer watchdog Rospotrebnadzor, broke the news to Nezavisimaya Gazeta, warning that the virus has moved far beyond isolated risk groups, with more than one percent of pregnant women in those regions testing positive.
The crisis hits especially hard in industrial hubs like Kemerovo, Irkutsk, and Sverdlovsk, where over two percent of residents carry the virus. Behind the numbers, patient demographics are shifting fast.
Researcher Natalya Ladnaya reported that more than three percent of Russian men aged 40 to 50 are now infected, with the average patient age jumping from 32 to 44 over the past 15 years.
Heterosexual sex now drives two-thirds of all new infections, yet treatment is falling dangerously short. Ladnaya warned that only half of Russians living with HIV have suppressed the virus, leaving at least 600,000 people capable of transmitting it to others.
For patients on medication, suppression reaches about 78 percent, lagging behind the 95 percent World Health Organization benchmark.
Careless clinic blunders
Hospitals are also fueling the crisis. In 2025, Russian clinics logged a 15-year record of healthcare-associated blood-borne infections, primarily spreading hepatitis C and HIV. According to health official Elena Igonina, clinic staff triggered widespread ward outbreaks—with watchdog Rospotrebnadzor investigating 11 separate clusters across ten regions in 2026—by reusing disposable catheters and blood-testing monitors across multiple patients.
Compounding these hygiene failures, the country also recorded a separate breakdown in donor blood screening that same year: two patients contracted HIV directly through contaminated blood transfusions, marking the first such transfusion-transmitted cases documented in Russia in six years.
Meanwhile, the annual death toll remains staggering, with 30,000 to 34,000 Russians dying from HIV complications. For each death, official tallies record roughly 1.5 new infections, The Moscow Times notes.
Moscow plans to fund treatment for 30,000 extra patients under its 2027 draft budget, but that expansion falls well short of containment needs after doctors diagnosed 45,000 new cases in 2025 and 52,000 in 2024.
20-fold increase among soldiers
In July 2025, Carnegie Endowment released a paper noting that HIV detection among Russian military personnel had skyrocketed during the first years of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
According to the paper, the number of new HIV cases found among the Russian armed forces had grown 13-fold by the end of the year the invasion began (2022), and by the end of 2023, the number had increased to a level 20 times higher than pre-war levels.
