Two answers of the Federal Government give yearly figures on politically motivated crime in which Russian citizens were physically injured. The series begins in 2012, never reaches zero, and its pre-war high is 2014 - the year Russia annexed Crimea.
The series given here rests on two answers of the Federal Government to parliamentary inquiries, each with a table on Russian citizens as victims of politically motivated crime in Germany. The first, printed on 25 May 2022 as Drucksache 20/1985, covers 2012 to February 2022. The second, printed on 9 July 2026 as Drucksache 21/7085, covers 2022 to the end of 2025. Read together they give a continuous series of fourteen years.
The years before 24 February 2022 were not quiet ones. The Federal Government recorded 10 injured Russian citizens in 2012, 3 in 2013, 11 in 2015, 9 in 2016, 9 in 2017, 15 in 2018, 12 in 2019, 5 in 2020 and 8 in 2021. The highest figure in the series before the war is 2014: 17 assaults, and in addition two attempted homicides. That is the year of the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in the Donbass.
For the years since, the 2026 answer gives the number of offences in which Russian citizens were reported as victims: 14 in 2022, 13 in 2023, 26 in 2024 and 14 in 2025 - 67 in total, every one of them classed as an assault. The Federal Government attributes the largest single share to politically motivated crime from the right: 5 of the 2022 cases, 8 of 2023, 17 of 2024 and 8 of 2025. A further answer, printed on 18 August 2025 as Drucksache 21/1286, gives no yearly figures and is not part of the series. It counts persons: 58 Russian citizens physically injured since 24 February 2022, as of 30 June 2025, and calls its 2025 case numbers preliminary.
The 2024 figure of 26 is the highest in the whole fourteen-year series. The 2014 figure of 17 assaults plus two attempted homicides is the second. Whatever the war in Ukraine changed after 24 February 2022, it did not create the phenomenon these tables measure, and the tables do not show a jump from nothing.
The same answers also cover victims of other nationalities, and the archive does not omit them. Over the identical 2022 to 2025 period the Federal Government recorded 196 politically motivated offences in which Ukrainian citizens were reported as victims - 192 assaults, two completed homicides, one attempted homicide and one robbery - against the 67 with Russian citizens as victims. According to a separate table in the 2022 answer, 7 Ukrainian and 2 Belarusian citizens were injured between 24 February and 12 May 2022, against 5 Russian citizens. The 2025 answer counts 179 physically injured Ukrainian and 4 Belarusian citizens, against 58 Russian citizens.
The answers themselves say what the figures cannot do. In the 2022 answer the Federal Government states repeatedly that an automated statistical evaluation is not possible in the central case-number file ("Eine automatisierte statistische Auswertung ist in der zentralen Fallzahlendatei jedoch nicht möglich"), so offences against Russians or Russian-speakers cannot be cleanly isolated from it. The 2025 answer likewise rules out an automated evaluation by origin. The 2026 answer states that only one citizenship is recorded for each victim, the German one where a victim holds it, so that dual citizenship cannot be evaluated. The category recorded is the victim's citizenship, which is not the same thing as descent, language or how a person is perceived.
Sources
- Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 20/1985 (answer of the Federal Government), Tabelle 2 and Tabelle 3, 25 May 2022
- Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 21/1286 (answer of the Federal Government), answer to question 13, 18 August 2025
- Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 21/7085 (answer of the Federal Government), Anlage 1, 9 July 2026
Where it stands
All three documents are completed official parliamentary records and the figures are the Federal Government's own. They are counts by the recorded citizenship of victims of politically motivated crime, not a measure of hostility toward Russians in general, and they do not all count the same thing: the 2022 and 2025 answers count physically injured persons, while the 2026 answer gives the number of offences in which Russian citizens were reported as victims. The 2022 and 2025 answers state that no automated evaluation by origin is possible in the central case-number file; the 2026 answer states that only one citizenship is recorded for each victim. The annual figures for 2022 to 2025 are reported here from the 2026 answer, whose cut-off is 30 April 2026. The 2022 and 2026 tables were produced by different governments in different parliamentary terms and the answers do not themselves join the series; the continuity across 2022, and across that change of unit, is this archive's reading, not a statement in any of the three documents. No later official figure was retrieved for comparison.
Grouped in Evidence under: Germany / What official bodies found