The purges underway among the defense leaders in Russia are the work of the FSB, with the approval of the Kremlin, and are the result of the clash between the two agencies which worsened following the failure of the Russian forces to take Kiev following the invasion of February 2022, as well as their usual competition for power and funding, writes the Moscow Times. After the “triumph” of the security services, dozens, if not hundreds, of other arrests among the ranks of the military are in sight, explain sources in the ministry, government and Kremlin.
In addition to the dismissal of Sergei Shoigu – who nevertheless planned for the position of Secretary of the National Security Council – and the arrest of his deputy Timur Ivanov shortly before, on April 23, four other defense officials were arrested, with the motivation fight against corruption or abuse of power in the military sector, in the name of better use of the huge incoming funding, as confirmed by the appointment of economist Andrey Belousov as minister. The FSB, writes the independent newspaper, is trying to take away from the military a slice of the record budget for this year (6-8 percent of GDP).
“There’s a drastic cleanup underway. The FSB is wiping out Shoigu’s former team. We should have expected it. It’s the type of operation that can only be completed with the green light from the top leadership. It will take more long before the purges can be said to be complete, there will be more arrests,” said a source close to the Kremlin.
These are the “largest” purges in Russia’s post-Soviet history, a government official added. By the end of the year, there will be dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people of different ranks arrested in all the different sections of the ministry”, he added. And at the same time there will be promotions and honors within the FSB.
And this is true even if the reshuffle implemented by Vladimir Putin at the beginning of his fifth term in the Kremlin also affected Nikolai Patrushev, a 72-year-old intelligence strongman, former director of the FSB and secretary of the Security Council, for whom it was reserved a position of advisor in the Kremlin. But whose son, Dmitry Patrushev, Minister of Agriculture, was guaranteed a promotion to Deputy Prime Minister.
Even before Ivanov’s arrest at the end of April, the FSB had visited the ministry on Frunzenskaya bank several times, a Defense Ministry source said. Investigations into his embezzlements had been going on for five years. Now, he pointed out, there are more Czechs than soldiers in the building. “There was tons of information on corruption patterns in the ministry, criminal cases piled up. But as long as Shoigu was minister and had enormous influence, the investigators could not move forward”, it is specified.
“There must be only one agency to blame for the failure of the invasion of Ukraine. It could have been the security services, which were busy preparing for war and had promised Putin a quick and easy victory operation, or the second most powerful armed forces in the world of PR Tsar Shoigu who had promised a victory for Putin”.
Yesterday, the deputy commander of the General Staff, Vadim Shamarin, and the senior officer of the Ministry of Defense Supply Directorate, Vladimir Verteletsky, were arrested. Previously arrested were General Yuri Kuznetsov, head of personnel at the ministry, and General Ivan Popov, former commander of the 58th Army.
“The vertical of power has transformed into a sort of warehouse from which Putin chooses this or that figure, if and when it is needed. But these are increasingly rare cases and this is why the highest steps of the vertical always the more they resemble a retirement home for officials whose strength and power are dissolving”, commented Andrey Pertesev, in an article for Carnegie in which he underlines how the highest sector of the vertical is becoming “more and more crowded”, giving rise to a “stagnation”.
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