Russia's quiet HIV epidemic continues to swell, now with 1 out of every 25 men aged 15-50 infected.
Authorities now suspect the rate is much worse considering the lack of tests. pic.twitter.com/q70MX9H8NK
— SPRAVDI — Stratcom Centre (@StratcomCentre) December 1, 2025
The number of people with HIV infection continues to grow in Russia: over the past year, it has increased by 35 thousand people to 1.25 million, said Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the Federal Scientific and Methodological Center for AIDS Prevention and Control.
“The risks of infection are very high. In our country, if we take only adults, from 15 to 50 years old, it is more than 1% [of the population]. That is, every hundredth [Russian] is infected with the virus. And if we take certain age groups, say, men 40-45 years old, then it’s 4%. That is, 1 out of 25 men is infected with the virus,” Pokrovsky said (quoted by TASS). He stressed that not all patients with HIV are registered – according to the Ministry of Health, there are now 900 thousand of them.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Russia is at the level of African countries in terms of HIV incidence. In Russia, there are 890 HIV-infected people per 100 thousand population. This is about the same as in Guinea (874), Liberia (944) and Nigeria (961), and more than, for example, in Chad (771), Ethiopia (601) or Mali (523).
Russian indicators are several times worse than France (358), Great Britain (191), Sweden (171), as well as such post-Soviet countries as Kyrgyzstan (147), Kazakhstan (136) and Tajikistan (63).