After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the biggest Hollywood studios, Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music and other foreign services left the market. According to Novaya Gazeta Europe, this not only expanded the circulation of pirated content but also changed attitudes toward copyright inside Russia.
A source linked to online cinemas told the outlet that total revenue of legal Russian platforms rose from 90 billion rubles at the end of 2023 to 120 billion at the end of 2024. The forecast for 2025 is another 35% increase, to about 150–160 billion rubles. The source said subscriptions are driven mainly by Russian TV series, while traditional cinemas have still not recovered from crisis conditions and partly stay afloat through higher ticket prices and illegal “pre-screening service” showings of Hollywood films.
“After the majors left, Russians began paying only for Russian content,” the source said.
Because foreign rights holders have largely stopped going to court in Russia, pirated films now appear not only on illegal websites but also on VK Video and RuTube. The same source said it is difficult to measure the true scale of such viewing: pirate sites do not publish visitor data, and counters on Russian platforms are not fully reliable.
Pirates also affect Russian cinema itself: annual damage is estimated at 2 billion rubles. The cybercrime company F6 said the Russian piracy market shrank by 14% due to blocking measures, with its total size now estimated at $16.6 million. In publishing, industry estimates say pirate book resources account for 10% of the market and cause yearly losses of 4 billion rubles.
Freedom Letters technical director Vladimir Kharitonov said that after being blocked, Flibusta, Lib.rus.ec and Rutracker largely stopped responding to publishers’ complaints. He said paper-book piracy now mostly involves unauthorized translations of authors who do not license rights for Russia, as well as facsimile print runs that save pirate publishers hundreds of thousands of rubles in preparation costs and advances.
A music journalist interviewed by the outlet said piracy has not yet become the main factor in his field, but some listeners are again downloading music and using MP3 players because internet access is unstable and artists disappear from Yandex Music under censorship restrictions. The paper argues that censorship itself makes pirated content especially attractive: illegal distributors do not need to cut scenes or search for supposed “Satanism” or “LGBT propaganda.”