The Kremlin’s declared campaign to eliminate graft and corruption in the Russian army claimed a new victim on Sunday with the arrest of Major General Mirza Mirzaev on suspicion of shaking down military contractors for epic kickbacks.
Mirzaev, 52, was formerly Vice Commander in Russia’s Southern Military District, for the national law enforcement agency Rosgvardia.
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While serving as the Interior Ministry’s top official for logistics and supply over a giant territory covering Russia’s southwest regions bordering Ukraine and southern Caucasus republics, Mirzaev allegedly demanded a 140 million ruble ($1.42 million) bribe from a civilian contractor supplying prefabricated buildings to the government.
Working through an intermediary Mirza, reportedly, threatened the contractor with cancellation of a lucrative 480 million ruble ($4.88) construction contract, if the company did not fork over the kickback to him personally, in cash, charges filed by prosecutors in a Moscow court said.
A judge ordered Mirzaev held without bail until review of the charges on Jan. 2. Russian independent and state-controlled media widely reported the arrest and details of the alleged kickback scheme.
Russia’s main agency for prosecuting serious crimes, the national Investigative Committee, on Oct. 28th opened a criminal case against Major General Aleksander Ogloblin, former head of the Russian army’s Signal Troops Command.
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According to a report by the independent Astra news agency, Ogloblin will face charges of taking bribes worth more than 10 million rubles ($101,000) while serving the Russian military’s top communications officer. He allegedly received kickbacks and incentive payments from, among others, managers from the Telta corporation, a major telephone manufacturer in Russia’s west Siberian Perm region.
Oglobin had been sent to prison for 4.5 years in February 2022 after having been found guilty of accepting a 1.6 billion ruble ($16.27 million) bribe connected with army telecoms equipment purchasing, but was set free after testifying against a colleague also involved in facilitating Tetla sales to the Russian army.
An Oct. 30 British Defence Intelligence statement confirmed Oglobin’s second arrest and the new charges.
The highest-profile Russian general officer corruption charges-related arrest thus far in 2024 took place in May, when a Moscow military court charged Major General Ivan Popov with fraud leading to the loss of more than 100 million rubles’ ($1.01 million) in state property while in command of the 58th Combined Arms Army in combat in south Ukraine in 2023.
Prosecutors have accused Popov, a tough-talking, popular-with-troops paratrooper with conspiring to sell at least 2,000 tons of construction materials intended to be used for fortifications, on the black market for personal gain.Popov has denied the allegations emphatically. In a pre-trial statement made at the 2nd Western Court military court in Petersburg on Oct. 18, he said prosecutors had no viable evidence to support the charges and claimed he was being persecuted because of personal vendettas against him by other senior officers.
One of the few Russian field commanders willing to criticize top military leadership publicly, Popov has accused the Army General Staff and its head, Valeriy Gerasimov, for prosecuting the war against Ukraine unprofessionally and ignoring feedback from troops. Popov claimed “all officers under my command” would either testify or make written statements to back up his innocence.
On May 14, General Yuriy Kuznetsov, head of the Russia Defense Ministry’s personnel and assignments division, was arrested on suspicion of accepting “an exceptionally large bribe” while serving as a security head in the Russian Army General Staff, an independent Abzatz news agency report said.Investigators searching Kuznetsov’s dacha home in an elite district outside Moscow found more than 100 million rubles ($1.01 million) in foreign currencies, gold, high-value watches and art objects prosecutors claimed were too valuable for him to have acquired them with his army salary, the report said.
May saw the arrest of two other more generals along with Kuznetsov and Popov: Vice Defense Minister Timur Ivanov and Major General Vadim Shamarin – the second the officer Kusnetsov turned states’ evidence against, in order to secure his release.
The British Defence Intelligence report said: “(T)he goal of the Russian authorities is almost certainly not the elimination of corruption entirely: this behavior is fundamental to the functioning of the regime. Instead, Russian authorities are likely seeking to limit corruption to more manageable levels.”
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