Mafia state is a term which has been used to describe the political system in Russia under Vladimir Putin's rule. The term came to prominence following the United States diplomatic cables leak, which revealed that US diplomats viewed Putin's Russia as a "a corrupt, autocratic kleptocracy centred on the leadership of Vladimir Putin, in which officials, oligarchs and organised crime are bound together to create a 'virtual mafia state.'" Former Russia correspondent of The Guardian, Luke Harding, who was expelled from Russia in 2011, released the book Mafia State in 2011. According to Harding, Putin has "created a state peopled by ex KGB and FSB officers like himself, bent on making money above all." In the estimation of American diplomats, "the government [of Russia] effectively [is] the mafia."

According to the New Statesman, "the term had entered the lexicon of expert discussion" several years before the cables leak, "and not as a frivolous metaphor. Those most familiar with the country had come to see it as a kleptocracy with Vladimir Putin in the role of capo di tutti capi, dividing the spoils and preventing turf wars between rival clans of an essentially criminal elite." In 2008, Stephen Blank noted that Russia under Putin is "a state that European officials privately call a Mafia state" that "naturally gravitates toward Mafialike behavior." Putin's decision to run for a new term as President in 2012 led to Russia being downgraded from a hybrid regime to an authoritarian regime in the 2011 Democracy Index.

The Mafia (also known as Cosa Nostra) is a criminal syndicate that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in Sicily, Italy. It is a loose association of criminal groups that share a common organizational structure and code of conduct, and whose common enterprise is protection racketeering. Each group, known as a "family", "clan", or "cosca", claims sovereignty over a territory in which it operates its rackets – usually a town or village or a neighbourhood (borgata) of a larger city. Its members call themselves "men of honour", although the public often refers to them as "mafiosi".

According to the classic definition, the Mafia is a criminality originating in Sicily - i.e. Cosa Nostra. However, the term "mafia" has become a generic term for any organized criminal network with similar structure, methods, and interests.

The Mafia proper frequently parallels, collaborates with or clashes with, networks originating in other parts of southern Italy, such as the Camorra (from Campania), the 'Ndrangheta (from Calabria), the Stidda (southern Sicily) and the Sacra Corona Unita (from Apulia). However, Giovanni Falcone, the anti-Mafia judge murdered by the Mafia in 1992, objected to the inflation of the use of "Mafia" to organized crime in general:

State commonly refers to either the present condition of a system or entity, or to a governed entity (such as a country) or sub-entity (such as a province or region).