Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, has put at least 3,220 cases under his “personal supervision” since the start of 2025, according to calculations by Novaya Gazeta Europe based on posts from the committee’s Telegram channel, Information Center of the Investigative Committee of Russia. That amounts to about 13 cases a day on average, with some days reaching 20.
On August 25, 2025 alone, the outlet says, the list included a wide range of incidents: a boy falling from a bed at a children’s camp near Novosibirsk, a complaint from a woman in Tambov over compensation after her husband was killed in the war, the condition of a residential building in Saransk, a dog attack on a girl in the Nizhny Novgorod region, and a case over the “desecration of symbols of military glory” after an incident in Kazan.
According to an employee of the Sverdlovsk branch of the Investigative Committee, the phrase “personal supervision” reflects the work of the central office. Three staff members are said to monitor the news around the clock, selecting stories by keywords including orphans, people with disabilities, unsafe housing, defrauded homebuyers, utilities, roads, and the “special military operation.” Reports on such cases are then supposedly submitted to the committee chairman every one or two days.
The effectiveness of this system is hard to judge: once a case is reported as having been placed under Bastrykin’s supervision, information about its дальнейшее progress usually disappears. As the paper notes, the Investigative Committee does not say how such checks or investigations end. The head of the Ryazan branch of the committee has said that these are often high-profile cases, and that not all of them fall within the agency’s jurisdiction.
An analysis of the posts suggests that Bastrykin’s attention follows the media agenda and rarely stays on one subject for more than a month. After a mass knife fight in Chekhov in August 2023, nearly one-third of the cases under his supervision involved migrants, but that share dropped sharply a month later. A similar pattern appeared again in October 2024: migrant-related cases made up almost 25%, then fell to 16% in November and 5% in December.
Russian media spent the week speculating about Bastrykin’s next appointment, but in the end Vladimir Putin extended the 72-year-old official’s term by another year, until August 2026. Previously, the law barred anyone over 70 from heading the Investigative Committee, but the rules were changed in 2024, giving the president the power to waive age limits. If Bastrykin remains in office, this will be his sixteenth year at the head of the agency.