Russia scores 27 on the Equaldex Equality Index — a Legal Index of 35 and a Public Opinion Index of 19. The specialist European audit is far harsher: ILGA-Europe's Rainbow Map 2026 puts Russia at 2%, 49th of 49. Last in Europe, behind Azerbaijan and Turkey.

The gap between those two numbers is mostly Equaldex crediting the floor. Same-sex activity between adults has not been a criminal offence since 1993, and a handful of Equaldex's binary questions turn on that. ILGA asks what protections exist on top of it and finds close to none. Equaldex also lists the status of homosexuality itself as varying by region, which is the tidiest possible description of something covered below.

What the score cannot show is the legal device the state now uses, because it is stranger than a law. In November 2023 the Supreme Court designated the "international LGBT movement" an extremist organisation. No such organisation exists. ILGA World's description of the consequence is the accurate one: since the movement is not a real body, "who can be found as a participant or an organiser of it is open to very loose interpretations."* OVD-Info, which documents political prosecutions, calls this a construct invented by the authorities so that they can ban an entity and then label organisations its subdivisions and individuals its members "without having to prove any actual connection" — and lists three other inventions built the same way.*

The effects are measurable. At least seven criminal cases for LGBTI extremism were opened in 2024, and the volume of content blocked for alleged LGBTI propaganda rose nearly twelvefold year on year.* Then on 23 January 2026 the Ministry of Justice designated ILGA World itself — a federation of more than 2,000 organisations in 170 countries — an "undesirable organisation", alongside eight others from the United States and Europe. Russian citizens who continue to engage with an undesirable organisation face up to six years in prison. ILGA World was given no direct notice, and the official reasons have not been published.*

That last one lands on this site directly. The ILGA figure quoted three paragraphs up comes from that federation's European arm, and the accommodation directory this page would normally send you to is exactly the kind of foreign organisation the law is written for. So the usual "find a welcoming place to stay" tip is absent below, and its absence is the finding.

Chechnya is a separate matter inside the same country. Between February and April 2017, Chechen law-enforcement and security officials rounded up dozens of men on suspicion of being gay, held them in unofficial detention, and beat and tortured them; some were forcibly disappeared, others returned to their families barely alive.* It was not a single episode: Human Rights Watch documented a further wave in which at least 23 men were detained, and reported in 2021 that the campaign had not ended.* One national score of 2.7 covers both this and a large city where the risk is ordinary discretion. It is kept in this section rather than given a block of its own because it is a fact about this value, not a separate subject.

↓ What this means before you travel

The EIU scores Russia 2.03, 150th of 167, down six rank places. That is the lowest democracy score on Fair Away — below Saudi Arabia at 2.08 and China at 2.11, the two countries most readers would expect to find at the bottom.

One sub-score does most of the work. Electoral process is 0.00. Not low: zero. Civil liberties sit at 2.06 and functioning of government at 2.14, while political culture, at 3.75, is the highest of the five — which is to say the measure of how the public relates to democratic norms outscores every measure of whether the institutions work.

Press freedom is where the year-on-year movement is visible. Reporters Without Borders places Russia 172nd of 180 in 2026 with a score of 23.15, down from 171st and 24.57 in 2025. Its political indicator is 176th in the world at 11.76.* There is no trend arrow on this dimension even so: both sources point downward, and neither movement on its own is large enough to state a direction without guessing at it.

This is the highest score on the page by a distance, and it is the one that needs the most explaining. It averages lived conditions, where Russia ranks 75th of 181, with the World Bank's Legal Frameworks score of 72.3 — and that legal half is an average of a statute book that does not resemble itself.

Mobility, work, marriage, childcare and assets each score a full 100 out of 100. Safety scores 0. Not low, not partial — zero out of a hundred, the only such figure I have found on any country in that file. Entrepreneurship scores 25.

The same World Bank release publishes two further pillars, and both point the same way. Supportive Frameworks — whether anything exists to put the law into effect — comes out at 53.58 against the 72.3 on the law itself. The expert-opinion pillar scores safety at 0 again. Three separate measurements from one publisher, in one edition, agreeing that there is nothing there.

What sits behind the zero is not an omission. Russia removed first-offence domestic violence from the criminal code in 2017 and has passed no dedicated law in its place, so the World Bank is not recording a gap in coverage — it is recording a deliberate repeal. A score of 7.2 built on mobility, education, property and paid work is accurate about a woman who is working, mobile and owns something. It says nothing about whether anyone will come when she calls.

Russia scores 0.41 in the World Justice Project's 2025 Index, 119th of 143. The movement matters more than the position: down 4.9% in a single year, which the WJP records as the largest decline of any country in that edition, ahead of Sudan and Mozambique — in a year when 68% of all countries declined.*

One case from this year shows what that looks like at close range. On 9 April 2026 the Supreme Court designated "International Public Movement Memorial" an extremist organisation. Memorial is one of Russia's oldest human rights groups and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 for documenting war crimes, human rights abuses and the abuse of power. The Justice Ministry had filed the case on 27 March; it concluded in a single hearing, held behind closed doors, with the file classified top secret and Memorial's own lawyers not permitted to take part.*

The Court described Memorial's work as "vocally anti-Russian, aimed at destroying the foundations of Russian statehood, undermining territorial integrity, and eroding historical, cultural, spiritual, and moral values." The Justice Ministry said it had identified 196 "active participants". Memorial's political prisoners project lists 1,504 people, with more than 5,000 it considers imprisoned on apparent political grounds.*

This is the same invented-movement device as the LGBTQ+ section above, applied to a different target. Two of our five values on this page are being moved by one legal technique, and that is the most useful single thing to take away from the numbers.

↓ What this means before you travel

Not every country is measured on every value. Where the public data doesn't exist, we'd rather tell you than fill the gap with a guess — and Russia is one of those cases.

The figure on our other country pages comes from the US Department of Labor's yearly review of what governments are doing about the worst forms of child labour, and that review covers the 131 countries which hold trade preferences with the United States. Russia is not one of them, so it is never assessed. The obvious alternative doesn't help either: the ILO and UNICEF's global estimates, published in June 2025, are built on household surveys in 107 countries and leave out Europe and Northern America entirely — in their own words, "because of data limitations".

That absence is not the same as zero. The ILO's regional estimate puts around 2.3 million children aged 5 to 17 in child labour across Europe and Northern America, against under 1 per cent of children in high-income countries as a group. No national figure is published inside that. So the honest summary is that the record here is unmeasured, and that in this particular case the reason it is unmeasured is political rather than technical.