FILE - This photo taken and released by Basmanny District Court press service on Wednesday, April 24, 2024, shows Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov standing in a defendants’ cage in court in Moscow, Russia. Ivanov was arrested on suspicion of accepting a bribe. FILE - In this undated photo distributed by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Saturday, Aug. 28, 2021, Lt. Gen. Yury Kuznetsov is seen during a military parade in Krasnodar, Russia.
Corruption, “is the essence of the system,” said Nigel Gould-Davies a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.Former Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov — the first official arrested in April and the highest-ranking one so far — oversaw large military-related construction projects and had access to vast sums of money. Those projects included rebuilding parts of Ukraine’s destroyed port city of Mariupol.
In April, the Investigative Committee, Russia’s top law enforcement agency, reported that Ivanov is suspected of taking an especially large bribe — a criminal offense punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Also, the deputy head of the federal prison service for the Moscow region, Vladimir Telayev, was arrested Thursday on charges of large-scale bribery, Russian reports said.The arrests suggest that “really egregious” corruption in the Defense Ministry will no longer be tolerated, said Richard Connolly, a specialist on the Russian economy at the Royal United Services Institute in London.Peskov said Russia’s defense budget is 6.7% of gross domestic product.
Greene said the government needs to “keep the war going in order to keep the economy going,” but also must ensure the costs — and corruption — are not higher than needed. It’s possible that officials sufficiently distant from Putin could have been caught in the middle of a turf war unconnected to the appointment of the new defense minister.