▲ Andrei Belousov, Russian Defense Minister, who was ordered by President Vladimir Putin to crack down on corrupt officials.Photo via Ap
Juan Pablo Duch
Correspondent
The newspaper La Jornada
Friday, August 30, 2024, p. 28
Moscow. The arrest on Thursday of General Pavel Popov, who was Deputy Defense Minister for 13 years until last June, has marked the continuation of the purge of the Russian military leadership, which is being carried out by the minister, economist Andrei Belousov, who took office in May to fulfil President Vladimir Putin’s mandate to put an end to corruption at the highest levels of the Russian military hierarchy, fuelled by the bloated budget consumed by the special military operation in Ukraine.
With Popov, there are now 13 top-level officials: three deputy ministers, most of them with the rank of general and a few colonels, identified as members of the entourage – to a greater or lesser degree of closeness – of the previous minister, Sergei Shoigu, who are already behind bars awaiting trial for alleged crimes such as bribery, fraud, embezzlement and prevarication.
Three people under investigation in corruption cases in the Ministry of Defense also died before being tried: General Magomed Khandayev, head of the Main Directorate of State Expertise; General Oleg Tsokov, deputy commander of the Southern Military District; and businessman Igor Kotelnikov, front man for Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, under whom the removal of senior military officials began in late April.
Like Ivanov, Popov was one of Shoigu’s closest collaborators, relocated by Putin as secretary of the Russian Security Council and until now untouchable.
Popov and Shoigu met in the 1990s, when the latter served as Minister of Emergency Situations. The Investigative Committee of Russia (IRC) believes that between 2021 and 2024, the general diverted funds intended for the construction of the Patriot military park, as well as the Russian Orthodox Church temple dedicated to the armed forces and the adjacent exhibition and congress center, which Shoigu ordered to be built to glorify the Russian army.
A luxurious mansion
According to the CIR, the stolen money was used to finance the purchase of luxury furnishings for a mansion on the outskirts of Moscow, built by companies that did not charge a single ruble in exchange for lucrative contracts for the Patriot project. Once in the mansion, the general continued to pay for the upkeep of his estate on an exclusive three-hectare estate from the federal budget.
Popov’s arrest is the latest of such a high-ranking military officer, but it will most likely not be the last, following that of retired Colonel Vladimir Demchik on August 6, on suspicion of having received large bribes, according to the CIR.
Demchik, who had become deputy general manager of the Textile Trading Company, which supplies uniforms to the troops, served for many years as head of the Supplies Department of the Ministry of Defense, a period during which a businessman, according to the CIR report, gave him the equivalent of just over 900 thousand pesos to favor him with 26 contracts.
On August 5, it became known that two other people involved, like Popov, in the Patriot corruption schemes were arrested: General Vladimir Shesterov, former deputy director general for Innovations at the Ministry of Defense, and Colonel Vyacheslav Akhmedov, director of that military park, allegedly linked to an embezzlement equivalent to just over 9 million pesos.
On August 1, police arrested Vladimir Pavlov, general director of Voentorg (Trade for Military), a state-owned company that supplies the Russian army, for an alleged fraud of nearly 92 million pesos, and Sergei Sukhov, former head of the branch of the Military Construction Company in the Central Military District, who is accused of embezzling 46 million pesos.
Shortly before, on July 26, the FSB (Russian acronym for the Federal Security Service) reported that, in a joint operation with the Ministry of the Interior and the CIR, it arrested General Dmitry Bulgakov, former deputy minister of defense and head of the army’s rear, who is accused of receiving commissions of between 5 and 10 percent for each multimillion-dollar contract he awarded to private companies to supply the army with poor-quality food at inflated prices, among other alleged crimes.
On July 25, Andrei Belkov, director of a military construction company, was arrested. In his previous position, until 2021, he was the general director of Special Construction Works at the Ministry of Defense, a period during which he is accused of several crimes.
General Vadim Shamarin, the director general of the defence communications department and deputy chief of the army general staff, was jailed on May 24 for allegedly receiving 8 million pesos in bribes from the director of a Perm telephone factory in exchange for better contracts. On May 21, it was the turn of Vladimir Verteletsky, an official of the State Assignments Department, who, according to the investigation, committed malfeasance, causing damage of 15 million pesos to the military treasury.
On May 17, police detained General Ivan Popov (no relation to the former deputy minister, former commander of the 58th Army participating in the operation in Ukraine) on charges of being part of a group (one of the participants is General Oleg Tsokov, his chief, who was killed when a missile hit Popov’s army command center in the city of Berdyansk, and the other a businessman Sergei Moiseyev) that allegedly stole 1,700 tons of metals intended to fortify troop positions.
On May 13, the FSB arrested General Yuri Kuznetsov, Director General of Defense Personnel and former head of the Army General Staff Department in charge of protecting state secrets, on suspicion of receiving large bribes, in association with the first senior military officer on Shoigu’s team to fall for his excesses, Deputy Minister Timur Ivanov.
Arrested on April 24, two weeks before his great protector left the defense portfolio, Ivanov oversaw the construction sector and, according to the investigators who are investigating his case, he handed out multimillion-dollar contracts in exchange for bribes and, believing himself to be unpunished, he lived a life of luxury that allowed him to live in a mansion in the center of the Russian capital and own two Rolls-Royce vehicles, one in Moscow and another in Paris, according to local press reports.
