The film industry in Russia has lost almost 2 billion rubles in six months due to piracy.

The first half of 2025 brought significant losses to the Russian film industry from online piracy: According to preliminary estimates by experts, the damage amounted to about 1.6–1.7 billion rubles. This amount exceeds 50% of the total turnover of the pirate market for the whole of 2024, which, according to analysts, reached about 3 billion rubles. Such figures indicate that the illegal distribution of video content in the online environment remains high.

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In addition, researchers have recorded an increase in the number of new pirated links: in January–June 2025, their number increased by 30-35% compared to the same period last year. This demonstrates that, despite the efforts of law enforcement agencies and platforms to block infringing resources, pirate communities continue to actively expand their online presence. To do this, they use a range of technical methods: they create new websites, use automatic systems for generating "mirrors" (duplicate resources), connect content delivery networks (CDNs) to speed up downloads, and bypass filters using various workarounds. This was reported by Izvestia journalists based on the collected data.

"In 2024, 12.5 million units of pirated content were blocked, which is 42% more than in 2023. Growth continues in 2025. As a result, even with the improvement of law enforcement practices and a decrease in the profitability of pirated sites, the threat level remains the same, and the losses for the film industry are significant," said Andrey Krichevsky, chairman of the Russian Center for the Turnover of Rights to Creative Results, an all—Russian public organization.

Read more in the exclusive Izvestia article:

Download without the right: pirates robbed Russian cinema of almost 2 billion