The arrests of Russian generals attain the management of the Army General Staff | International | EUROtoday

The deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, Lieutenant General Vadim Shamarin, has joined the record of senior commanders detained by the nation's authorities within the house of a month. The Investigative Committee in command of the investigations accuses Shamarin, the pinnacle of military telecommunications, of getting acquired “large-scale” bribes, the identical cost with which two senior officers near the previous Minister of Defense have been beforehand despatched to preventive detention. Sergei Shoigu and a preferred basic who denounced the interior issues of the armed forces.

The Kremlin denies that it’s enterprise a scientific purge inside the military. “The fight against corruption is a constant work. This is not a campaign, it is a continuous work (…) and it is carried out in all departments, whether federal or municipal,” said Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, in his daily press conference.

Shamarin, 52, faces up to 15 years in prison. Head of the General Directorate of Communications of the army since 2021, the general has suffered the same fate as his predecessor in office, Jalil Arslanov, who was arrested a year earlier and is still being tried behind closed doors for alleged fraud. According to the investigation, Arslanov allegedly awarded the acquisition of some equipment to a Russian company, and it repurchased it from China.

This is the fourth high-ranking Russian soldier detained in the last month. The arrest of the then Deputy Minister of Defense Timur Ivanov weeks before Shoigu's dismissal opened the season at the end of April, and the purge accelerated after President Vladimir Putin announced the replacement of the Minister of Defense by the economist Andrei Belousov, the last May 12. The following week it was the turn of the former person responsible for protecting state secrets, General Yuri Kuztnetsov, and this Wednesday Ivan Popov, one of the generals who stopped the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Zaporizhia in 2023, was sent to prison. Spartacusthe military man denounced last year that the army's lack of materials led to the death of its soldiers.

“Andréi Belousov's most important mission as Minister of Defense is not to interfere in the purge of generals carried out by the Federal Security Service – the FSB, successor to the KGB,” political scientist Stanislav Belkovski wrote on his Telegram channel. . The skilled believes that Shamarin might have paid for the failure within the invasion of Ukraine: “The problems in the army's telecommunications were the talk of the town a long time ago. “Many experts believe that poor telecommunications, whose money was, as usual, stolen, have been the main reason for the failures of the Russian armed forces, especially in 2022.”

Unlike the arrest of General Popov, the arrest of Shamarin has caused a wave of joy in the Russian ultranationalist sector and the Russian propaganda machine has immediately pointed to the command of the General Staff as one of the culprits for the army's problems. Curiously, many have noted that the theft of army funds had been known for years, but no public figure had dared to denounce corruption in more than two years of war and Shamarin continued to hold a high position in the Russian military hierarchy. In fact, criticism of the army can lead to several years in prison under the law “on discrediting the actions of the Russian armed forces.”

Kremlin circles themselves have admitted that corruption was The voice of the people. The director of the Russia Today channel, Margarita Simonián, has told an alleged anecdote about Shamarin's arrest on her social networks. “Morning conversation in Moscow salons. —Do you know that they arrested the head of army telecommunications yesterday? -Why are you surprised? Yesterday you bought a walkie-talkie to sell it in a store.”

A well-known Russian military blogger, Andrei Morozov, nicknamed Murzreported in November 2022 that the Ministry of Defense had acquired the Azart telecommunications system for 275,000 rubles (2,750 euros) per unit, but it was of no use for the front and the army was forced to replace them with Chinese kits several times cheaper. Murz He never saw Shamarin behind bars: the blogger supposedly committed suicide three months ago after being forced to delete a post about the real numbers of soldiers killed in the final assault on Avdiivka.

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