Russian authorities are pushing for a 17‑year prison sentence for Alexey Kupriyanov, a former deputy director of FGAU “Oboronles,” after he was tried in a major fraud case involving the illegal harvest and sale of timber from protected military forests. According to court materials, Kupriyanov was part of an organised group that authorised clear‑cutting across the Irkutsk, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, and Chelyabinsk regions.
It comes amid global coverage of Russian corruption in the military, government, and among oligarchs. Last year, Dmitry Kurakin—former head of the Defence Ministry’s property relations department and former Deputy Prime Minister of the Moscow Region—was tried and sentenced to 17 years for the same racket, with the court accusing officials of inflating timber costs for trenches, bunkers, and fortifications on the Ukrainian front line. Investigators say the group fabricated forest‑health reports to justify cutting healthy cedar, larch, and pine across 4,000 hectares and sold the timber at market prices, often to Chinese buyers.
Prosecutors allege that commercial loggers paid roughly 123 million rubles in bribes to enable the operations, and that the defendants received at least 180 million rubles in illicit payments from businesspeople involved in timber sales, several of whom later cooperated with investigators.
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).
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 and is not limited to accounting for the number of troops it can field.
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 well as its top commanders, to provide honest assessments of the state of the equipment and of the 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.”
