Russian war crimes are violations of international criminal law including war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide which the official armed and paramilitary forces of Russia have committed or been accused of committing since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, as well as the aiding and abetting of crimes by proto-statelets or puppet statelets which are armed and financed by Russia, including the Luhansk People's Republic and the Donetsk People's Republic. These have included murder, torture, terror, persecution, deportation and forced transfer, enforced disappearance, child abductions, rape, looting, unlawful confinement, starvation, inhumane acts, unlawful airstrikes and attacks against civilian objects, use of banned chemical weapons, and wanton destruction.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented Russian war crimes in Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine and Syria. Médecins Sans Frontières also documented war crimes in Chechnya. In 2017 the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has reported that Russia used cluster and incendiary weapons in Syria, constituting the war crime of indiscriminate attacks in a civilian populated area. The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, set up by the OHCHR, found Russia committed war crimes in Ukraine in 2022 and 2023. On 13 April 2022, OSCE published a report finding that Russia committed war crimes in the Siege of Mariupol, while its targeted killings and enforced disappearance or abductions of civilians, including journalists and local officials, could tentatively also be crimes against humanity.

By 2009, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued 115 verdicts (including the verdict in the Baysayeva v. Russia case) in which it found the Russian government guilty of perpetrating enforced disappearances, murder, torture, and failing to properly investigate these crimes in Chechnya. In 2021, the ECHR also separately found Russia guilty of murder, torture, looting and destruction of homes in Georgia, as well as preventing the return of 20,000 displaced Georgians to their territory.

As a consequence of its involvement in the war in Ukraine, wide-scale international sanctions have been imposed on Russian officials by the governments of Western countries (twice in 2014 and twice in 2022). In 2016, Russia withdrew its signature from the International Criminal Court (ICC), when the Court began investigating Russia's invasion and annexation of Crimea for violations of international law. As a result, the United Nations General Assembly Resolution ES-11/3 officially suspended Russia from the UN Human Rights Council membership due to war crimes in Ukraine. Many Russian officials were found guilty by local courts for war crimes committed in both Chechnya and Ukraine. Ultimately, since 2023, the ICC indicted six Russian officials, including Russian leader Vladimir Putin, for war crimes in Ukraine.

After the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), the area around Kars was ceded to Russia. This resulted in a large number of Muslims leaving and settling in remaining Ottoman lands. Batum and its surrounding area was also ceded to Russia causing many local Turkish and Georgian Muslims to migrate to the west "as a result of persecution, or fear of persecution, by Christian Russians."

The historian Uğur Ümit Üngör noted that during the Russian invasion of Ottoman lands, "many atrocities were carried out against the local Turks and Kurds by the Russian army and Armenian volunteers." General Vladimir Liakhov gave the order to kill any Turk on sight and to destroy any mosque.

From 1917 to 1991, a multitude of war crimes and crimes against humanity were carried out by the Soviet Union or its constituent Soviet republics, including the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and its armed forces. They include acts which were committed by the Red Army (later called the Soviet Army) as well as acts which were committed by the country's secret police, NKVD, including its Internal Troops. In many cases, these acts were committed upon the direct orders of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in pursuance of the early Soviet policy of Red Terror as a means to justify executions and political repression. In other instances they were committed without orders by Soviet troops against prisoners of war or civilians of countries that had been in armed conflict with the Soviet Union, or they were committed during partisan warfare.

A significant number of these incidents occurred in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe before, during, and in the aftermath of World War II, involving summary executions and the mass murder of prisoners of war (POWs), such as in the Katyn massacre and mass rape by troops of the Red Army in territories they occupied.