Top Russian military official arrested on suspicion of bribery

Moscow. Timur Ivanov, one of Russia’s twelve deputy defense ministers, but perhaps the closest to the head of the portfolio, Sergei Shoigu, could not avoid the preventive detention that a Moscow court ordered him this Wednesday for at least the next two months. .

Arrested on Tuesday night by the Federal Security Service (FSB, Russian acronym for the successor body to the Soviet KGB), the Russian Investigative Committee charges Ivanov with the crime of receiving a “large bribe” (no less than a million rubles, equivalent to 10 thousand euros) which the Penal Code punishes with up to 15 years in prison.

Along with him, three more people are also detained, including his partner, Sergei Borodin, owner of 18 construction companies that benefited from contracts with the Ministry of Defense.

Ivanov’s fall from grace, political analysts agree, seems to have more delicate implications than the already embarrassing arrest of an alleged corrupt member of an army dedicated to the “special military operation” that has now lasted 2 years and two months in Ukraine.

What is surprising – in the opinion of a wide spectrum of observers, from Tatiana Stanovaya, a critic of the Kremlin, to Sergei Markov, a pro-government political scientist – is not Ivanov’s arrest, but that it has occurred precisely now, just a few hours after appearing in the television screens at a meeting of the army’s senior staff on the situation at the front, chaired by who is considered their great protector, Minister Shoigu.

Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov did not want to comment on Ivanov’s case, referring journalists to the official information provided by the agencies in charge of the investigation. He also did not specify whether Putin and Shoigu spoke about Ivanov, although he acknowledged that they maintain daily contact.

Abbas Galiamov, who worked for many years in the Russian Presidency Office writing speeches for the head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, considers that the defenestration of Ivanov at this moment – ​​in the weeks that the renewed composition of the government that must be announced is being discussed the president after he takes office for a fifth term on May 8 – reduces Shoigu’s chances of remaining in office.

But it is a decision that only Putin must make and other followers of Russian politics do not exclude that Shoigu manages to convince his boss and friend that he was not aware of his subordinate’s excesses – although his wife, Svetlana Maniovich , was in charge of displaying on social networks the luxurious life that the family of the now detained man could afford in Paris, on the French Riviera and other privileged places -, making Ivanov a simple scapegoat.

But it is hardly credible that the Minister of Defense was not aware, they argue, since everyone knew that Ivanov was not just another deputy minister, but rather one of Shoigu’s most trusted people since the time he served as governor of the Moscow region and he took charge of the energy sector with the rank of deputy prime minister of that federal entity.

Since then, starting at the end of 2012 when Shoigu assumed the Defense portfolio, Ivanov was close to him and in the military hierarchy, with the rank of deputy minister in the last eight years, he was in charge of an area that managed million-dollar budgets, that of everything type of works for the needs of the army, built by the troops or by contractors (the companies of his partner Borodin). These are, first of all, the fortifications on the Ukrainian front, as well as expensive projects that gave luster to Shoigu’s image, such as the Orthodox cathedral dedicated to the Russian army or the Park Patriot (Patriot). It is said that Ivanov was also handing out contracts for the construction of buildings in Mariupol, a port in the Donietsk region annexed by Russia.

The FSB, according to TASS, the official news agency, had been investigating Ivanov for years and, according to anonymous state security sources cited by the Russian portal Vashniye Istorii (Important Stories), he wanted to stop it in 2017 when he documented many irregularities from 2013 to 2016, while he was general director of the company Oboronstroy (Defense Construction), but Shoigu interceded for him and promoted him to deputy minister.

Unofficially, the version is circulating that, if Putin finally gave the green light to arrest Ivanov, this is because Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council, and Aleksandr Bortnikov, director of the FSB, were able to present “evidence” to him. that Ivanov committed “high treason.”

If true, until now no one knows the details of such a serious accusation, beyond the fact that, despite Putin’s ban, Ivanov has properties in countries “hostile” to Russia, that is, members of the NATO Treaty Organization. North Atlantic (NATO), where his family lives and they squander the fortune obtained by a simple – now former – vice minister of Defense.