MOSCOW.- A member of the Russian army’s General Staff was detained on allegations of large-scale bribery, Russian media reported Thursday, in a series of arrests of high-level military commanders in corruption cases.
The arrest of Lt. Gen. Vadim Shamarin followed the arrest last week of Maj. Gen. Ivan Popov, the former commander in charge of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, also on bribery charges.
Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov was arrested in April for bribery. Ivanov was a close collaborator of Sergei Shoigu, whom President Vladimir Putin dismissed as Defense Minister after starting a new term in May.
Lieutenant General Yury Kuznetsov, head of the Defense Ministry’s personnel office, was arrested on bribery charges two days after Shoigu was replaced.
Shamarin also heads the Defense Ministry’s main communications office. He was under a two-month detention order, according to Russian agencies that cited a military court. No other details of the case were reported.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the succession of detentions of defense commanders did not indicate a campaign against the army.
“The fight against corruption is an ongoing effort. This is not a campaign, it is ongoing work. “It is an integral part of the activity of our security agencies,” he said on Thursday in a conference call with journalists.
The number two in the federal prison service in the Moscow region, Vladimir Telayev, was also detained on Thursday on charges of large-scale bribery, according to Russian reports.
Shoigu was widely blamed for Russia’s failure to take kyiv early in the Ukraine war, and was accused of incompetence and corruption by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, who launched a mutiny in June 2023. to demand the dismissal of Shoigu and the chief of the General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov.
Less than a month after the failed Prigozhin uprising, Popov was removed as commander of the 58th Army. He said he had spoken to Shoigu that a lack of equipment had led to excessive deaths on the Russian side, and that his dismissal was a “treacherous” stab in the back of Russian forces in Ukraine.
Popov’s forces were fighting in the Zaporizhia region, one of the most disputed areas in the conflict in Ukraine. He was fired the day after the 58th Army’s command post in the city of Berdyansk was hit by a Ukrainian attack, killing a high-ranking general.
Source: With information from AP
