Russian deputy chief of general staff jailed for bribery

MOSCOW (AP) — A deputy chief of Russia’s military general staff has been arrested on charges of large-scale bribery, Russian news reports said Thursday, the latest in a series of arrests of senior military officials on bribery charges.

The arrest of Lt. Gen. Vadim Shamarin followed the arrest of Major General Ivan Popov, a former commander of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, earlier this week, also on bribery charges.

In April, Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov was arrested on bribery charges. Ivanov was a close confidant of Sergei Shoigu, whom President Vladimir Putin fired as defense minister shortly after Putin took office for a new term in May. Lieutenant General Yuri Kuznetsov, head of the Defense Ministry’s personnel directorate, was arrested on bribery charges two days after Shoigu was replaced.

Shamarin, the most recently arrested officer, is also the head of the Main Directorate of Communications at the Defense Ministry. He will be held in custody for two months, Russian news agencies quoted a military garrison court as saying. However, further details of the case were not disclosed.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the wave of arrests of defense officials did not indicate a campaign against the military.

“The fight against corruption is consistent work. This is not a campaign, but an ongoing work. “This is an integral part of the work of our law enforcement agencies,” he said on Thursday in a telephone conference with journalists.

A few hours after Shamarin’s arrest, the Russian Investigative Committee announced that another Defense Ministry official had been arrested – Vladimir Verteletsky, head of a department in the ministry’s state defense procurement department.

Verteletsky was charged with abuse of office, which resulted in damage of over 70 million rubles, said Investigative Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko in a statement. He was remanded in custody pending investigation and trial.

The deputy head of the Federal Penitentiary Service for the Moscow region, Vladimir Telayev, was also arrested on Thursday on large-scale bribery charges, Russian reports said.

Shoigu was widely blamed for Russia’s failure to take Kyiv at the start of the fighting in Ukraine and was accused of incompetence and corruption by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, who sparked a mutiny in June 2023 to demand the dismissal of Shoigu and Military Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov.

Less than a month after Prigozhin’s failed uprising, Popov was dismissed as commander of the 58th Army. He said he had spoken to Shoigu about inadequate equipment that had led to excessive Russian deaths and that his dismissal was an “insidious” blow in the back of Russian forces in Ukraine.

Popov’s troops fought in the Zaporizhia region, one of the most hotly contested areas in the Ukrainian conflict. His dismissal came a day after the 58th Army command post in the city of Berdyansk was hit by a Ukrainian attack, killing a senior general.