EGN NEWS DESK
Russia has jailed a high protection official, the fourth in a month, state media reported on Thursday, increasing President Vladimir V. Putin’s largest shake-up of his army management because the invasion of Ukraine greater than two years in the past.
A Moscow army courtroom ordered Lt. Gen. Vadim Shamarin jailed for 2 months on Wednesday on suspicion of “large-scale” bribery, state information companies mentioned. He faces 15 years in jail. General Shamarin was a deputy head of the Russian army’s essential commanding physique, the overall workers, and oversaw its communications directorate.
The detention of General Shamarin is the newest in a collection of high-profile arrests which have coincided with Mr. Putin’s appointment of a brand new protection minister, Andrei R. Belousov, earlier this month.
Timur Ivanov, a deputy protection minister, and Lt. Gen. Yuri Kuznetsov, who oversaw the ministry’s personnel division, have been detained for a similar bribery cost in latest weeks. And earlier this week, state media reported that Maj. Gen. Ivan Popov, the previous commander of Russia’s 58th Combined Arms Army, had been detained on fraud allegations.
The Kremlin tightly controls the justice system, and brought collectively, the corruption arrests sign Mr. Putin’s most aggressive effort to overtake his army management because the disastrous beginnings of his Ukraine invasion in early 2022.
“Fighting corruption is deliberate work,” the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, informed reporters on Thursday, rejecting the notion {that a} purge was underway. “There’s no speak, after all, about any form of marketing campaign.”
In the primary two years of the struggle, Mr. Putin oversaw few publicly introduced modifications, not to mention arrests, of his army management, regardless of widespread studies of corruption, mismanagement and incompetence by his generals.
With his army on the again foot, analysts mentioned, Mr. Putin positioned a premium on loyalty and sought to keep away from doubtlessly destabilizing personnel strikes.
But now, Russia’s Army is on the offensive alongside a lot of the frontline, whereas Ukraine struggles with shortages of arms and personnel. Having orchestrated a rubber-stamp re-election in March and an inauguration to a fifth time period in May, Mr. Putin seems assured sufficient in his grip on energy and his army edge to come back down harshly in opposition to army leaders who’ve fallen out of favor.
One of the Kremlin’s targets seems to be displaying the Russian public that it’s taking severely the army’s corruption downside, a subject that well-liked Russian bloggers who assist the struggle have written about extensively because the invasion started.
Underlining that effort, one in every of Russia’s essential state information companies, RIA Novosti, reported on Thursday that General Shamarin’s spouse purchased a $200,000 Mercedes S.U.V. in November 2022 — although his accessible monetary studies present a family revenue of not more than $34,000 a yr on the present change charge.
Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.
