NEWSWEEK
Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s recent war machine purge of his top military and defense officials is part of an ongoing surge in corruption and bribery cases in the country amid the war in Ukraine, according to analysis by an independent Russian news outlet.
Verstka, which was founded shortly after the war began, said in analysis published on August 13 that the number of bribery cases in Russia has increased by one-and-a-half times since before the conflict started in February 2022.
There were 3,202 bribery cases registered in Russia in the first half of 2021, while 4,958 cases were registered between January and June this year, marking a 55 percent rise, the outlet said.
“The armed forces and the military-industrial complex remain the drivers of corrupt practices due to their lack of transparency,” Verstka found.
Newsweek has contacted Russia’s Defense Ministry for comment by email.
A number of prominent military officials have been detained in recent months, including former Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, who was arrested on April 23 on suspicion of taking bribes.
Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s long-standing defense minister, was also abruptly removed from his post in May. Putin replaced him with economist Andrei Belousov.
Other prominent arrests include the detention of Vladimir Verteletsky, a defense ministry official, in May. Russia’s Investigative Committee said he stands accused of taking a bribe in relation to “work that was not carried out” under a government contract in 2022.
Vadim Shamarin, deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, was also detained in May “in connection with the case of alleged fraud,” Russian newspaper Kommersant reported. Shamarin is reported to be a top aide to Russia’s top general, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, and had served as deputy chief of the Russian General Staff since 2021.
Yuri Kuznetsov, the head of the Russia’s Defense Ministry’s personnel department, was also detained in May on suspicion of taking a bribe, while Major General Ivan Popov, who had headed Russia’s 58th Army, was “arrested on suspicion of fraud,” state news agency Tass reported on May 21.
And in late July, Andrei Belkov, the director of the Defense Ministry’s Military Construction Company, was accused of abuse of power in the execution of a state defense order, Kommersant reported, citing security agency sources. He was detained for purchasing a tomograph at an inflated price while he was the head of another military organization under the defense ministry—the Main Military Construction Directorate for Special Facilities.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, leading experts on Russia’s security services, said some of the arrests have amounted to “the most serious attack on the Russian military” in Putin’s nearly 25-year rule.
“One by one, military officials are being thrown into jail. With the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine looking more favorable for the Kremlin than for some time, Putin appears to think this an appropriate moment to punish the army for the failures of 2022,” Soldatov and Borogan said in analysis for the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) in May.
Soldatov told Newsweek that the arrests were likely ordered by Putin himself.
“The FSB and the Investigative Committee do not initiate such investigations/repression—it’s done on the orders coming from the very top, i.e. the administration of the president,” Soldatov said.
“The role of the FSB is to provide compromising material and squeeze more from the arrested during their interrogations,” he said, adding that Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) “acts on an ‘object principle’.”
This means FSB officials “work meticulously on the object that needs to be cleansed or put under control,” Soldatov said.
“It could be a region, or a ministry, as with the [Russian Ministry of Defense]—usually, they detain one of several deputies, so they could be interrogated about their superiors and colleagues—that, it is believed, makes sure the ‘object’ is firmly under Kremlin control,” Soldatov added.
“There is a fierce cleanup underway,” a source close to the Kremlin and Defense Ministry told the independent Russian news outlet Moscow Times in May. “There is still a long way to go before the purges are finished. More arrests await us.”
Anton Gerashchenko, a former adviser to Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that Russian sources say “criminal cases are being prepared for Russian generals due to failure of the Kursk region’s defense,” referring to Ukraine’s surprise incursion into the region on August 6.
Ukrainian forces have so far seized control of 1,150 square kilometers (444 square miles) of Russian territory and 82 settlements in Kursk, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Oleksandr Syrsky, said on August 15.
“The ‘cleansing’ of the Russian Ministry of Defense, which started after the dismissal of Sergei Shoigu, may continue with a new series of arrests of high-ranking law enforcers who failed in the defense of the Kursk region,” Gerashchenko said on August 16.
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