In the wake of government and NGO reports documenting an explosion in the number of hate crimes in Moscow and other Russian cities, Moscow's chief prosecutor Yuri Semin has again aggressively minimized the problem of racist violence in the city, according to April 8, 2008 articles in Rossiyskaya Gazeta and Komsomolskaya Pravda quoting from a press conference the previous day. Mr. Semin stated that his office is investigating over 30 cases of "attacks on people based on xenophobia" (the term "hate crime" does not exist in Russian law), but he was quick to add that he sees no evidence of an increase in such attacks.

Mr. Semin started on firm ground by criticizing an estimate put out by one NGO (the Moscow Bureau on Human Rights) that there are 70,000 skinheads in Russia. "Who counted them, how did they do it?" he asked. "It's all just made up." UCSJ and most other groups that monitor xenophobia in Russia do not use this statistic, since there is no reliable way to measure the number of neo-Nazis in Russia, but it is nevertheless widely cited in the Russian media.

He then, however, made a series of tendentious statements. "I have not seen such an explosion [in hate crimes], which would surprise me," he continued. "If a Krygyz is killed, then it has to be because of his ethnicity. A Kyrgyz for some reason can't be killed here for some other motive!" Mr. Semin concluded caustically. In a March 19, 2008 interview with the government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Mr. Semin took a similar line: "I am sure that there is no growing wave of extremism," he said. "Yes, there have been crimes motivated by religious and ethnic hatred... But statistics show that year by year the number of such crimes is falling."

In a February 18, 2008 interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda, Moscow's police chief Vladimir Pronin denied that there was any "organized group of skinheads in Moscow, there are just separate groups." This statement echoed his language from six years ago, when the problem of racist violence was not nearly as acute. In a March 2002 interview, Mr. Pronin said about neo-Nazi groups in Moscow, "I do not know of such a party, nor do I want to recognize it," and claimed that reported neo-Nazi attacks were mostly just committed by soccer hooligans.

Neither Mr. Semin or Mr. Pronin has publicly responded to Russian MVD figures that show a three-fold increase in the number of "extremist related crimes" from 2004-2007.

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