For the past two years, there’s been something going on over at Russia’s military command and it isn’t pretty.
Since May 2024, there have been a snowballing series of criminal investigations, firings, compromising press leaks, and other embarrassing revelations centered on Russia’s Defense Ministry.
Investigators -- mainly from the Federal Security Service, or FSB -- along with prosecutors and Interior Ministry authorities have targeted a growing number of deputy defense ministers, senior officers, and top civilian officials for alleged corruption, fraud, and embezzlement, among other offenses.
On April 10, a Moscow military court sentenced Deputy Defense Minister Pavel Popov to 19 years in prison on embezzlement and bribery charges.
Like Popov, many of those targeted are longtime associates of Sergei Shoigu, whom President Vladimir Putin dismissed as defense minister in May 2024 amid a wider government reshuffle. Shoigu, who has known Putin for decades, was moved over to head Russia’s Security Council, and was replaced by Andrei Belousov, a technocrat and economist.
Many of the deputy defense ministers targeted were fired shortly after Shoigu’s removal; several are linked to a major Defense Ministry contractor that oversaw the construction of a Moscow-area military theme park called Patriot Park.
That company, Bamstroyput, was a major subcontractor for the Emergency Situations Ministry. Shoigu headed that ministry for 21 years before Putin shifted him to the Defense Ministry in 2012.
There’s wide speculation about what, and who, is behind the investigations and the broader purge. One explanation stems from the conduct of the all-out war on Ukraine, which quickly showcased what experts say were command structure problems, outdated doctrine, among both Russia’s military and civilian entities, as well as rampant small- and large-scale corruption.
Much of the criticism of the Russian military’s failures in Ukraine centered on Shoigu, as well as Russia’s top military commander: the chief of the General Staff,: General Valery Gerasimov.
“My sense is the purges originated with intra-elite and inter-service rivalries,” said John Hardie, deputy director of the Russia Program at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank.
“Shoigu had criticized the defense industry… for insufficient supplies to the military. And although it bears much of the responsibility for the failure of the invasion’s initial phase, the FSB apparently managed to shift the blame onto the” Defense Ministry, he said.
Among Shoigu’s loudest critics was Yevgeny Prigozhin, a St. Petersburg restaurateur who built a formidable private mercenary force called Wagner Group, which became one of the more effective Russian units fighting in Ukraine.
Two months after Prigozhin staged an abortive mutiny in June 2023, he died in a plane crash widely believed to be an assassination.
Shoigu’s rivals, or enemies, may have opted to highlight the corruption within the ministry under him as being outside of norms, Hardie said.
“Those arguments may have resonated with a Kremlin that seems sensitive to the fact that military spending is consuming so many resources,” he said. “Hence the decision to make a public spectacle of anti-corruption arrests and to appoint Belousov, an economics-minded technocrat, with a mandate to ensure efficient defense spending.”
