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About $1 Billion is paid in bribes each year in Russia to secure admission requirements and passage of exams.

Source:  Peter Finn, “Taking On Russia’s Ubiquitous Bribery,” Washington Post, July  14, 2008.

There were an estimated 5 million drug addicts in Russia in 2010, with half of all addicts addicted to heroin.

Heroin causes at least 30,000 deaths per year in Russia.

Source: Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, “Russia blames Nato for heroin surge from Afghanistan,” BBC News, February 27, 2010.

Russia President Dmitry Medvedev stated that police corruption and incompetence lead to 760,000 theft cases, 124,000 burglaries and over 2,000 murders or attempted murders to all go unsolved each year.

Source:  AFP, “Medvedev orders crackdown on Russian police corruption,” Google News, February 18, 2010.

In 2009, one-quarter of all stores selling software in Russia were selling pirated copies of Windows, according to Microsoft.

Source:  Associated Press, “Microsoft: Pirated software still in Russian shops,” San Jose Mercury News, February 8, 2010.

$1 Billion worth of “Jin Ling”, a Russian-made cigarettes that is only sold on the black market, is smuggled into Europe each year.

The illegal factories in Russia making cigarettes to be smuggled are able to produce up to 24 billion cigarettes annually, equal to 7 percent of the EU’s legal imports.

Source:  Roman Shleynov, Stefan Candea, Duncan Campbell, and Vlad Laurov, “Made to be Smuggled,” Tobacco Underground, Center for Public Integrity, October 19, 2008.

The economic impact of illegal logging activities in Russia is estimated to be $2 Billion, according to the WWF.

Source:  Andreas Schloenhardt, “The illegal trade in timber and timber products in the Asia-Pacific region,” Australian Institute of Criminology, Research and public policy series no. 89, January 2008, page 67.

In the first nine months of 2009, over 800 Russian officials faced charges of corruption.

Source: “Over 800 Russian officials face corruption charges in 2009,” Xinhua, January 13, 2010.

The sales of counterfeit vodka bottles in Russia is estimated to be $3.3 Billion (101 Billion Rubles).

Source:  Bloomberg, “Bootleg Vodka Crackdown May Lift Legit Brands,” BusinessWeek, December 29, 2009.

According to officials in Russia, more than one third of all logging activities in the country is controlled by organized crime syndicates.

Source:  Alfonso Daniels, “Battling Siberia’s devastating illegal logging trade,” BBC News, November 27, 2009.