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"Knives in the back"/ What is happening in the Russian Ministry of Defense?
2026-04-18 09:49:19 / BOTA
Over the past two years, something has happened in the command of the Russian army, and it hasn't been pretty.
Since May 2024, there has been a series of criminal investigations, dismissals, compromising leaks of information to the media, and embarrassing revelations centered around the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Investigators – mainly from the Federal Security Service, or FSB – along with prosecutors and Interior Ministry authorities have targeted a growing number of deputy defense ministers, senior officers and senior civilian officials on suspicions of, among other things, corruption, fraud and embezzlement.
Backstabbing 2.0: Russia's Defense Ministry
Something has happened in Russia's military command over the past two years: investigations targeting a growing number of deputy defense ministers and senior officers on suspicion of corruption. The most high-profile cases, related to the construction of a military park in the Moscow area, target former deputies to Sergei Shoigu, who stepped down as defense minister in 2024.
On April 10, a military court in Moscow sentenced Deputy Defense Minister Pavel Popov to 19 years in prison on charges of embezzlement and bribery.
Like Popov, most of those targeted are longtime associates of Sergei Shoigu, whom Russian President Vladimir Putin removed from his post as defense minister in May 2024 amid a broader government reshuffle. Shoigu, who has known Putin for decades, was later appointed head of Russia's Security Council, and was replaced in the ministry by Andrei Belousov, a technocrat and economist.
Many of the deputy defense ministers who were targeted were fired shortly after Shoigu's departure. Some are linked to a major Defense Ministry contractor that oversaw the construction of a military-themed park in Moscow called "Patriot Park."
This company, called Bamstroyput, was a major subcontractor of the Ministry of Emergency Situations. Shoigu had led the ministry for 21 years before Putin appointed him to head the Ministry of Defense in 2012.
There is much speculation about what and who is behind these investigations and this sweeping purge. One explanation is linked to the unfolding large-scale war in Ukraine, which quickly exposed what experts say were problems in the command structure, outdated doctrine, and widespread corruption on both a small and large scale in Russia's military and civilian entities.
Much of the criticism of the Russian military's failures in Ukraine focused on Shoigu, as well as Russia's top military commander, Chief of the General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov.
“My impression is that the purges stemmed from rivalries within the elite and between the services,” said John Hardie, deputy director of the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank.
"Shoigu had criticized the defense industry... for insufficient supplies to the army. And, although it bears a large share of responsibility for the failure of the initial phase of the invasion, the FSB seems to have managed to shift the blame to the Defense Ministry," he added.
Among Shoigu's most vocal critics was Yevgeny Prigozhin, a St. Petersburg businessman who built a powerful private mercenary force called the Wagner Group, which became one of the most effective Russian units in the fighting in Ukraine.
Two months after Prigozhin organized a failed uprising in June 2023, he died in the crash of the plane he was traveling on, an event widely believed to be an assassination.
Shoigu's rivals, or enemies, may have chosen to highlight corruption within the ministry under his leadership as something that went beyond the norm, Hardie said.
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