A high-ranking official in the Russian military has been sentenced to 17 years in a high-security jail as part of a major fraud case involving the illegal harvest of timber from protected forests as well as inflated costs of timber materials used in the construction of trenches, bunkers and fortifications on the Ukrainian front line.
It comes amid global coverage of Russian corruption in the military, in the government and among oligarchs, which has helped Ukraine fend off a Moscow invasion. Dmitry Kurakin is the former head of the Russian Defense Ministry’s property relations department and a former Deputy Prime Minister of the Moscow Region. Two additional defendants in the case — Vladislav Kholodkov, the former head of Oboronles and Kurakin’s former deputy, and Maksim An, the former head of the Maltinsky Military Forestry Enterprise — also received lengthy prison terms and substantial fines.
According to Interfax, the charges include accepting large-scale bribes (Part 6 of Article 290 of the Russian Criminal Code), abuse of power (Part 3 of Article 285), illegal arms trafficking (Part 1 of Article 222), and organizing the illegal production of weapons (Part 3 of Article 33 – Part 1 of Article 223).
Investigators revealed that the defendants accepted bribes totalling at least 180 million rubles (or $1.7 million) from businesspeople in exchange for enabling the unauthorized clear-cutting of forests in the Nizhneudinsk and Shelekhov military forestry areas of the Irkutsk region. The illegally harvested timber was then sold for profit.
The latest sentence comes amid concerns that Russian Oligarchs, who are fueling the global trade of conflict timber, are also profiting from corruption within the Russian military. According to US Media, graft in the Russian military, particularly during its Soviet history, is not a new phenomenon, nor is it limited to accounting for the number of troops it can field.Â
Corrupt practices have hollowed out not only the armour of its tanks but also the accurate numbers of its fighting forces and its ability to equip its front-line troops as its top commanders to provide honest assessments of the state of the equipment and active duty and reserve forces they oversee.
“These are the kinds of things that result from either total incompetence or corruption: false reporting, people signing off on things that don’t meet standards, and, of course, the individual Russian soldier.
It’s legendary the stealing that they do,” according to retired Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, who last oversaw all US Army operations in Europe, beginning in 2014 when Russia first annexed Crimea and kicked off the ongoing violence in Ukraine’s east, a region known as the Donbas.
“It’s corruption from the top,” Hodges says, “down to the individual Russian soldier.”
