Russia arrested Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov Tuesday on suspicion of large-scale bribery. Ivanov is one of 12 deputies reporting to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Ivanov, who was responsible for overseeing construction, property management, housing, and medical support for the military, was accused of running a “criminal conspiracy” in awarding military construction contracts that enriched him personally.
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Ivanov was arrested along with longtime associate Sergei Borodin, and businessman and Defense Ministry contractor Alexander Fomin, who is accused of paying bribes to win construction contracts. Ivanov, 48, is a core member of Shoigu’s Defense Ministry, and was sanctioned by both the United States and the European Union in 2022 after Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
The exact details of the case remain murky. Ivanov, previously investigated by opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s team for lavish spending, was detained just after a meeting with colleagues, including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
As an indication of the amount of trouble Ivanov has found himself in, he’s being held in prison until at least June 23.
According to the Associated Press:
Ivanov’s lawyer, Murad Musayev, told the state news agency Tass that his client is being accused of “taking a bribe in the form of free construction and repair work on supposedly his personal properties,” and in turn providing “assistance to companies that were contractors for the Defense Ministry.”
That seems like small potatoes for probable cause to arrest a man with Ivanov’s political profile in the notoriously corrupt Defense Ministry.
Arrests of people of Ivanov’s standing are very rare. When they do happen, they indicate some sort of covert internecine conflict or a tool to cause the discrediting and downfall of the arrested person’s boss. Or both.
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Come for the Corruption, Stay for the Treason
The cuffs had barely been slapped on Ivanov’s dainty wrists when Russian Telegram channels lit up with the news attributed to “anonymous FSB sources” that Ivanov had been arrested by FSB counterintelligence agents and charged with “state treason” for cooperating with an unnamed intelligence agency. The corruption charge was simply a ruse to hide the actual cause of his arrest. Allegedly, there were dozens of home searches and arrests across Russia.
[Text is from Russian via Google Translate]
Two unrelated sources close to the FSB told Important Stories that the real reason for the arrest of Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov was treason.
“A bribe is for the public. So far, they don’t want to talk publicly about treason – it’s a big scandal: after all, the Deputy Minister of Defense,” says one of our sources.
“No one would detain him for corruption. Everyone there [in the Kremlin] has known about this for a long time. Putin gave the command after he managed to convince that it was about treason,” another source said.
…
According to our interlocutors, the DCKR is also engaged in operational support of the current case against Ivanov. “Now they are deciding what to do with him: either they will put him in jail on a bribe and ‘finish him off’ in prison, or they will reclassify the charge as treason,” says our source close to the FSB.
This story was sufficiently widespread and troublesome to the Kremlin that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry “Pornstache” Peskov was forced to make a non-denial denial. In this audio clip, Peskov is responding specifically to the abovementioned story.
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No, nothing is known about this. Of course, now there are a lot of different interpretations around all this. Here, of course, you need to focus on official information. You know, all the more so there will be an investigation and here, you know, all these arguments are nothing but speculation around this case. You need to focus on information from the investigative agencies and, of course, in the end the court’s decision.
If you read it carefully, he never says the report is wrong.
Ukrainian media piled on. They essentially claim that they are the unnamed intelligence service that compromised Ivanov.
Who’s the Real Target?
As the best president we never had, Fred Thompson, observed in “The Hunt for Red October,” there has to be a plan. High-ranking officials and toadies of the Defense Minister don’t get arrested and thrown in jail for having improvements made on their house at government expense or for much of anything.
There is growing suspicion that the real target of the hit is none other than the Plywood Marshal himself, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
Allegedly, the FSB has had information about Ivanov’s corruption since 2017, and Shoigu kept them off him. The AP points out that Putin recently called for an anti-corruption campaign, and Ivanov was still given the mission of reconstruction efforts in the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol. This could make a suspicious person think that Shoigu had a personal reason for doing this.
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Before his arrest, Ivanov was seen attending a meeting with Shoigu and other military brass. The move against Ivanov came nearly a month after Putin called on the FSB to “keep up a systemic anti-corruption effort” and pay special attention to state defense procurement.
Russian media reported that Ivanov oversaw some of the construction in Mariupol — a Ukrainian port city that was devastated by bombardment and occupied by Russian forces early in the war.
Zvezda, the official TV channel of the Russian military, reported in summer 2022 that the ministry was building an entire residential block in Mariupol and showed Ivanov inspecting construction sites and newly erected residential buildings.
When senior people get arrested and charges of treason are bandied about and not officially shut down, you can rest assured that the seeming target is just a staked goat.
By now, the massive corruption in Shoigu’s Defense Ministry, in particular the much-ballyhooed multi-billion ruble program to “modernize” Russia’s armed forces, is probably recognized as a failure even by Putin. Shoigu is unpopular with the Russian public, and nothing makes the public in a totalitarian regime happier than occasionally giving them a head on a pike.
Is It More Than Just Corruption and Treason?
Igor Sushko, a Ukrainian race car driver who does political commentary and whom I view as generally accurate, has an interesting take. He sees what is happening as a settling of accounts.
Then after Putin had Prigozhin killed for the rebellion, Ivanov, with Shoigu’s blessing, sent a significant team (Redut PMC) from the MoD to Africa and started to systemically steal Prigozhin’s assets there including gold mines and oil & gas fields.
As a result, Patrushev and Bortnikov realized that this was Deputy Defence Minister Ivanov’s premeditated plan – to destroy Prigozhin one way or another to steal all his assets – billion of dollars. A plan that was enabled by Shoigu but executed by Ivanov, and hidden from Putin.
Putin now blames Ivanov for provoking Prigozhin to betray Putin with the June 23 2023 rebellion and his ‘March on Moscow.’ The artificial shell famine that Prigozhin complained so much about was traced directly to Timur Ivanov at the MoD.
Shoigu is now also in grave risk of retribution from Putin for what happened to Prigozhin. So far unclear how he will be dealt with, but quite possible Putin will use his upcoming inauguration and the new 6-year term as an excuse to replace Shoigu as Defence Minister.
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Vladimir Osechkin, an exiled Russian human rights advocate who runs the website Gulagu.ru, offers a broader theory of the arrest.
According to Osechkin’s sources, in 2021 Shoigu made Military Intelligence under the command of the General Staff fabricate countless reports for Putin which painted an apocalyptic picture: in the coming months NATO ground forces would enter Ukraine to de-occupy Donbas.
The false reports to Putin about NATO to instigate a crisis and a war to halt the investigation into their corruption worked, facilitating the start of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Shoigu and his mafia urgently needed this war.
Shoigu knows Putin well, and he was convinced Putin would not change horses midstream if they started a war against Ukraine. Not only did Shoigu manage to get rid of the 2021 corruption investigation against them by manipulating Putin, his MoD budget skyrocketed with the war.
We’ll be able to tell within the next couple of weeks if Shoigu is the target. If this story is true:
If Tsalikov has been detained and interrogated, then Shoigu is a goner, and the other Deputy Defense Ministers will be trotting off to the ministerial suite at Lubyanka Prison.
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Is It Bigger Than Shoigu?
If it turns out that Shoigu is the target, then the larger question becomes less about why it is happening than why it is happening now. Most totalitarian regimes are extraordinarily brittle because they aren’t based on institutions, they are based on personalities. Putin has stayed in charge of Russia for two decades not only because it was dangerous to oppose him but because it was profitable to be on his side. Putin’s War in Ukraine is not going well. Even if you are a rusbot who believes Russia was right to attack Ukraine to defeat George Soros and that they will win at some point, the hard fact is that Russia has had at least 400,000 men killed and wounded in Ukraine, along with billions of dollars in lost equipment and vanished weapons sales to foreign countries. With the overseas fortunes of Russia’s top oligarchs frozen and in jeopardy of being sold to pay reparations, Putin has to be aware that his grip on power is not as firm as it was five years ago.
The current circumstances require Putin to appear to know what the hell he is doing. Having a handful of his senior defense officers arrested for corruption or worse not only calls into question their boss’ competence, but it also doesn’t make the boss’ boss look terribly smart. That is not where you want to be in a totalitarian state with competing power centers.