Military corruption is the worst cancer currently giving headache President Vladimir Putin who urgently want success on the battlefield in Ukraine.
The Federal Security Service (FSB) is going after top Russian military officers in a sweeping purge by the security services.
President Putin is not happy with how the 2022 special military operation in Ukraine was conducted yet he had envisaged his troops would have captured Kyiv in just three days but the war grinds on today.
“There is a fierce cleanup underway. The FSB is mopping up [former Defense Minister Sergei] Shoigu’s team. It’s to be expected. This kind of operation can only be carried out with approval at the very top [of the country’s leadership],” a source was quoted by local outlet (The Moscowtimes).
In the two weeks since longtime defense chief Shoigu’s surprise ouster, four high-ranking officers have been arrested on charges ranging from bribery to abuse of power, the latest of which came late Thursday evening.
As these arrests gain momentum, they could widen into the “largest purges” in modern Russian history, an acting Russian government official said.
“I think by the end of the year, dozens, maybe hundreds of people of different ranks will be arrested in all Defense Ministry units,” the Russian government official said.
Security service officers handling corruption investigations had visited the Defense Ministry’s headquarters on Frunzenskaya Embankment even before Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov’s arrest went public in late April, a source close to the ministry said.
“There are more Chekists there [in the Defense Ministry building] now than military personnel, it seems to me,” the source said with sarcasm, using the Soviet-era term for security officials.
The Kremlin was quick to assert that the arrests were nothing more than the result of ongoing work to root out corruption at every level of the government.
“This is constant and consistent work to fight corruption, not a campaign,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday.
Following Ivanov’s arrest, investigators said the probe into his affairs had been underway for over five years, underscoring the fact that the authorities knew about the military’s corruption long before the latest arrests.
“There has been loads of information about corruption schemes in the Defense Ministry, criminal cases have been piled up. But while Shoigu was a minister and had enormous influence, investigators were not allowed to pursue them,” a second government official added.
The FSB’s Kremlin-authorized campaign shows that the security services are “triumphing” in the confrontation between the two leading wartime security agencies — the army and the FSB — a source close to the Kremlin told reporters.
“There must be one single party to blame for the failure of the invasion,” the source said.
“It is either the special services, which were engaged in intelligence and analytical preparations for the war and promised Putin a triumphant operation and a quick victory but failed,” he said, “or the ‘second army of the world’ under PR-czar Shoigu which was supposed to ensure Putin’s victory — but turned out to be a paper tiger and failed miserably.”
