St Petersburg Committee for Informatisation and Communications

Igor Nikonov, deputy chair of St Petersburg's Committee for Informatisation and Communications, said at preliminary ("zero reading") hearings on the city's 2026-2028 budget that city cameras were operating with analytics recognising "six kinds" of race and nationality, and that about 50,000 cameras, about half of the city network, had the function. According to The Moscow Times (Russian service, 26 August 2025, citing the outlet Rotonda) and The Insider (same day, citing the city newspaper Peterburgsky Dnevnik), he said the analytics identify concentrations of ethnic groups in particular districts and that the data are passed to law enforcement agencies, which "make appropriate decisions", and that the cameras are used to track gatherings of migrants and to find so-called "rubber" flats, where far more people are registered than live. The Insider reports him as saying that statistics on crimes solved would be compiled only at the end of the year. Kommersant had reported on 20 February 2025 that the city committee on interethnic relations, headed by Oleg Kapitanov, had signed a contract, worth about 38.4 million roubles by Kommersant's figures, to add ethnicity recognition to 8,000 of the city's 102,000 cameras to counter the formation of ethnic enclaves, and that the informatisation committee confirmed a licence had been bought at the end of 2024. Valery Fadeev, head of the Presidential Human Rights Council, called identifying ethnicity from camera images degrading to human dignity. The 50,000 figure does not match the 8,000 planned in February 2025, and none of the figures has been independently verified.