The Kremlin has launched a new offensive, but this time against the leadership of its own Ministry of Defense after two years and two months of war against Ukraine. The Russian Investigative Committee, an organization that combines prosecutorial and police functions at the same time, announced this Tuesday the arrest of Lieutenant General Yuri Kuznetsov, current head of Human Resources in the military department and, previously, head of the office for 13 years. in charge of protecting state secrets. His arrest joins the sending to prison at the end of April of Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, right-hand man of former Minister Sergei Shoigu, dismissed this week by President Vladimir Putin.
The Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case against Kuznetsov for an alleged bribe of 100 million rubles, around one million euros. The Russian authorities accuse him of having received this money from private companies when he headed the 8th Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces and the service for the protection of state secrets was subordinate to his command.
According to the indictment, the bribes took place in the middle of the war, between 2021 and 2023, so that Kuznetsov could carry out “certain actions in favor” of the companies. During the search of his mansion, the authorities claim to have found “cash in rubles and foreign currency, gold coins, collectible watches and luxury items.”
Kuznetsov’s arrest is the second in less than a month of a senior Shoigu commander. On April 23, Deputy Minister Timur Ivanov was arrested and sent to preventive detention on charges of having received “bribery on an especially large scale.” Specifically, about 1,000 million rubles, about 10 million euros.
Ivanov was responsible for the army’s construction works. Among his projects is the enormous, million-dollar Park Patriot on the outskirts of Moscow, where the cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces stands.
The former deputy defense minister was part of Shoigu’s circle. According to authorities, he received bribes from several army contractors to award them projects in exchange for commissions. One of the works investigated is the nerve center of the army, the Defense Directorate Center. This enclave has supercomputers that filter to the high command the information that it receives at the moment from all the corners where its Armed Forces operate, and with this data it gives orders.
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Ivanov’s defense requested that his client be sent to house arrest at his mansion in Rubliovka, the luxurious district on the outskirts of Moscow where some of the Kremlin’s elite reside. The request was denied by the court handling his case.
Patrushev, Putin’s valet
The arrest of both commanders is accompanied by the dismissal of the Minister of Defense since 2012, Sergei Shoigu. Very close to Putin since he began his political career in the nineties, the president granted his subordinate as an alternative the secretary of the Security Council, an advisory body that has also included other uncomfortable figures close to Putin, such as former president Dmitri Medvedev, and personalities who enjoy the total confidence of the president and are the true falconsof the Kremlin, especially former spy chief Nikolai Patrushev.
The latter was the secretary of the Security Council until being replaced by Shoigu this week. However, the Russian leader does not want to separate himself from Patrushev, the man who assumed the leadership of the Federal Security Service – the FSB, former KGB – after Putin left office in 1999 to take over the reins of the country.
The Russian president announced this Tuesday that Patrushev will now be the president’s assistant. In this way, his work does not change: the former spy chief has been responsible all these years for giving Putin his notion of the world outside the Kremlin walls through intelligence reports.
Another FSB agent and former head of the President’s Security Service, Alexei Diumin, has also been appointed assistant to the president. Diumin had served as governor of the Tula region since 2016, where he was relocated after commanding special forces and overseeing Russian actions in the illegal annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014. .
“The Security Council is a peculiar organization,” Antón Barbashin, director of the Riddle analysis center, says by phone. “We don’t know exactly what it does, apart from being an advisory board for Putin,” continues the expert, who, however, believes that Shoigu does not lose out in the change: “It is not a demotion, it is actually a promotion because he will get more personal access to Putin himself.”
In Barbashin’s opinion, the Russian president “now needs someone who can manage a war economy,” and that is why he has replaced Shoigu with the economist Andrei Belousov. This analyst believes that Moscow is not contemplating peace talks, unless they serve as a pause, because its objective is victory, even if the conflict drags on “to the end of this decade” and deepens the militarization of its economy.
Putin thus delivers another coup after taking office as president on May 7. With the military leadership tied short and power guaranteed for another term, until 2030, the president will make his first official trip abroad this week to meet with his main partner, the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, on a visit to Beijing and Harbin next Thursday and Friday.
Both leaders will discuss the collaboration of both countries against the West with the excuse of the 75th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Chinese communist leadership. According to the Kremlin in a statement, the two leaders “will discuss strategic interaction, identify key points for further development of Russian-Chinese cooperation, and also exchange views in depth on the most pressing international and regional problems.”
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