Day: May 27, 2024

Taken together, the arrests of at least four senior officers amount to the most serious attack on the Russian military in close to 25 years of Putin’s rule.

One by one, military officials are being thrown into jail. With the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine looking more favorable for the Kremlin than for some time, Putin appears to think this an appropriate moment to punish the army for the failures of 2022.

His repressive instrument of choice is, as always, his security service the FSB.

The campaign started within the Ministry of Defense, taking as its first victim Deputy Minister Timur Ivanov on April 23. This did not raise many eyebrows — Ivanov was famous for his lavishly luxurious lifestyle, which had long suggested possible corruption.

Three weeks later, Lt-Gen Yuri Kuznetsov, head of the personnel department at the ministry, was arrested on allegations that he was found with more than $1m in cash and valuables.

Like Ivanov’s detention, this could be waved away as not especially significant and was not thought likely to have any immediate implications for the Russian war in Ukraine. More probable, it was said, the move was just a follow-up to Sergey Shoigu losing his job as head of the ministry and moving to a new role as Secretary of the Security Council.

Then, suddenly in the week of May 20, the purge claimed two new victims, and this time it involved generals actually conducting the war — a former commander of the 58th army Maj-Gen Ivan Popov, and Lt-Gen Vadim Shamarin, deputy head of the general staff in charge of army communications.

It is notable that none of the charges relate to the conduct of Russia’s war in Ukraine. All are corruption-related, alleging massive fraud and large-scale bribe-taking.

In all cases the scheme of an attack is identical — while the criminal case is examined by the Investigative Committee, a sort of Russian FBI, the Committee uses the materials provided by the Military Counterintelligence department of the FSB (DVKR – Department Voeinnoi Konttrazvedki.)

The DVKR’s name suggests it aims to identify foreign spies in the Russian army, but that’s not exactly the case: the department has been always considered a tool to keep the military obedient, a way to secure the army’s loyalty to the existing regime. 

Putin realized the need for such an organization almost immediately after he came to power in 2000. As early as February of that year, he signed into law the “Regulations for FSB Directorates in the Armed Forces,” which expanded the functions of military counterintelligence and gave it the power to fight organized crime.

His 2000 decree broadened the role of FSB officers in the army to include the uncovering of possible threats to the regime. Added to their professional responsibilities was the fight against “illegal armed formations, criminal groups, and individuals and public associations which have set as their goal a violent change of the political system of the Russian Federation and the violent seizure or violent retention of power.” Thus Putin reinstated the FSB’s military counterintelligence department as the watchdog of army morale and also charged the agency with scenting out potential mutiny.

The army, which had hated and feared military counterintelligence since Soviet times (they were referred to as Osobists, from the Osoby Otdel, a special department, or as Major Molchi-Molchi meaning a Shush-Shush Major), took the hint.

Curiously, the huge powers given by Putin to this department didn’t make the FSB’s military counterintelligence department a political actor.

In fact, the department, by far the biggest within FSB, proved to be the least ambitious among the departments of the security service. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s the departmental heads (in 25 years there were only three) kept a low profile and always steered clear of political games.

There have been temptations. Most recently, the late mercenary leader Evgeny Prigozhin attempted to lure the head of the department into his intrigues, sending a letter to the head of the DVKR Nikolay Yuriev. Fighting to save his Wagner Group and (as it turned out) his life, he never received a reply from the intelligence officer.

The department was more focused on a systematic effort to improve its public image — sponsoring historical research, and helping with war movies set in the Great Patriotic War. It was such a large-scale propaganda effort that by the end of the 2010s one could easily think that it was the smart and heroic military counterintelligence officers of Smersh (Stalin’s military counterintelligence agency) who won the war, rather than the ordinary soldier.

But that unwavering loyalty, together with the department’s public relations campaign, has paid off now in the time of war.

The DVKR has been constantly expanding its operations since February 2022. The department took charge of the processing of PoWs in filtration camps, harassing Ukrainian civilians in the occupied territories, and acting against Ukrainian underground groups. The department set up new ad-hoc teams to supervise troops on the battlefield.

Confirmation of the department’s rising star can be seen in several ways. DVKR officers are now involved in more and more investigations in Russia, which had nothing to do with the military, and politicians are calling for the regime to reinstate Smersh and give more powers to the DVKR.

Russian officers understand that “compromising materials” collected by the DVKR, which form the pretext for the arrests, are likely available on almost anyone in the army and can be swiftly presented when needed.

The message doesn’t need too much elaboration — Vladimir Putin is cold-blooded enough to take his revenge at any moment of his choosing. No one is safe.

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists, and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.

In the weeks since Vladimir Putin sacked his longtime defence minister Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s FSB security service has pursued a series of high-level corruption cases against a deputy minister and department heads in what many insiders are now calling a purge in the defence ministry.

Andrei Belousov, the technocrat economist appointed to replace Shoigu, has a mandate to reduce corruption in the defence ministry and streamline military production for a long war against Ukraine that could largely be decided by industrial output.

But former defence and Kremlin officials, ex-officers and foreign observers have said it was likely the exit of Shoigu and loss of his protection that has allowed the FSB, the Russian security department responsible for internal investigations, to take down powerful officials in a power struggle that could have knock-on effects for how Russia fights the war in Ukraine.

“The FSB finally got their teeth in the defence ministry and general staff,” said Capt John Foreman, the UK’s former defence attache to Moscow, who said he believed the arrests could continue after “Putin’s patience had finally snapped”.

“Shoigu and Gerasimov provided a buffer, but now Putin decided he had to do something,” he said. “Shoigu kept the FSB largely away from the ministry throughout his tenure, there were very few arrests. Once the FSB has their teeth in you, who knows how far they will go.”

Throughout the war in Ukraine, Shoigu and Gerasimov have come under fire from pro-war advocates for the military’s setbacks and their failure to eradicate pervasive corruption within the armed forces. Last summer, this dissatisfaction reached its peak when Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner paramilitary group, initiated an unsuccessful rebellion against the military’s leaders.

Interagency rivalries run deep in Russia, and Shoigu’s ouster may have given investigators in the FSB and investigative committee an opportunity to dust off criminal cases against the top brass in an effort to seek promotions and praise.

“It’s the dream of any investigator to put a real live deputy minister of defence in prison, it’s cool, it’s the dream of a lifetime,” said one former Kremlin official. “You get new epaulettes for that, a promotion, some kind of award. You can earn a reputation for that.”

In the case of high-level prosecutions, the official said, Putin would probably be informed before an arrest was sought. But, the official added, he said it was unlikely the corruption cases were being initiated by the Kremlin itself.

In the span of a month, four top defence officials were arrested on corruption charges, marking the most significant crackdown in the defence ministry in years. The purge began on 23 April with the shock arrest of the veteran deputy defence minister Timur Ivanov for suspected bribe-taking.

Addressing the recent series of arrests, the Kremlin on Thursday denied any suggestion of a crackdown within the defence ministry.

“The fight against corruption is consistent work,” the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday. “It is not a campaign, it is constantly ongoing work.” Ivanov was a long-term confidant and protege of Sergei Shoigu. His detention is believed to have laid the groundwork for Shoigu’s dismissal, who was subsequently replaced as defence minister by Belousov.

In the weeks that followed, additional high-ranking officials were detained. These included Yuri Kuznetsov, the head of the ministry’s personnel department, and Vadim Shamarin, the head of the communications department of the Russian general staff. Hours after Shamarin’s arrest on Thursday, Russia’s investigative committee also reported detaining another defence ministry official – Vladimir Verteletsky, who headed a division in the state defence procurement department of the ministry.

While the Kremlin announced earlier this month that Russia’s top general, Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, would retain his position, the arrest of Shamarin, a direct deputy of Gerasimov, could weaken the general’s standing within the military hierarchy.

“The probability of Gerasimov’s dismissal has gone up. I would sell my shares in him right now,” said Foreman.

A former defence official said the arrests showed that the balance of power had swung in favour of Russia’s security services, while its military appears in disarray.

“The FSB’s department of counterintelligence operations (1st division) is becoming increasingly powerful. They currently hold all the cards and are tightening the screws,” said the official, who worked closely with Ivanov and Shoigu.

“It is not that Belousov’s arrival led to the purges, but the departure of Shoigu and his strongmen resource that enabled the arrest,” the official continued. “Shoigu in the end was a silovik [member of the security elite] and had their backing.”

Russian prosecutors have also gone after a senior general best known for his criticism of Shoigu and Gerasimov.

Maj Gen Ivan Popov, who commanded the 58th Combined Arms force, said last summer that he had been fired after he brought up problems on the battlefield, including the lack of counter-battery fire, and deaths and injuries the army was suffering from Ukrainian attacks. Popov, who Russian media said stood accused of stealing 100m roubles (£868,569) of metal, was arrested on Tuesday and placed in a pre-detention facility.

Gleb Irisov, a former Russian air force lieutenant who left the military in 2020, said he had spoken with an FSB source before the arrests who told him that the purge in the defence ministry would be prompted mainly by its failures in Ukraine.

“Under Sergei Shoigu, the defence ministry became heavily influenced by his personal network,” said Irisov. “From senior commanders to lower staff, key positions were filled with Shoigu’s picks – friends or friends of friends. He even created numerous deputy positions specifically for his allies.”

Those have included a reported mistress of Sergei Shoigu’s who headed companies that earned millions of pounds from contracts with the defence ministry.

Irisov said he regularly discovered substandard equipment in the military, including lightbulbs that melted at supersonic speeds while flying Russia’s modern Su-35 air-defence fighter, as well as shoddy trucks and air defence systems unable to shoot down modern drones. He said in part their deficiencies were the result of corruption under Shoigu.

“The overall quality of the military suffered because funds were routinely embezzled,” he said. “Military exercises often existed only on paper, as the allocated money was siphoned off.”