Daily Archives: March 9, 2011

We haven’t looked at the military crime blotter for a while.  And the last two weeks have been particularly rich with various types of incidents.  The sentences handed down in recent days are, of course, for crimes committed earlier.  While some criminals in shoulderboards are getting caught, it leaves one wondering how many offenses go unknown and unpunished.

• A conscript named Sergey Avdeychik was beaten severely on the parade ground of the Pechenga-based  200th Motorized Rifle Brigade (v / ch 08275).  The Murmansk School of Music graduate’s had surgery twice, his spleen removed, and he’s still too critical to relocate to a better hospital.
• A negligence case is being brought against the ex-commander of the Space Troops’ Command Center, Colonel Aleksandr Karpenko.  He apparently forwarded the name of an officer with a “severe reprimand” along with a list of other officers slated to receive monthly bonuses [i.e. Order 400A premium pay] for excellent performance.  As a result, Karpenko’s subordinate received 470,000 rubles illegally last year.
•  Conscript Nikolay Dorin apparently died of meningitis in Vladivostok.  He complained of a headache, and medics treated him with some pills, but they wouldn’t admit him to the military hospital in Vladivostok because it was already overflowing with patients.
• The Eastern MD military prosecutor tells the media he’s worried about the rise in “nonregulation relations” [i.e. dedovshchina and other violence and crime], and the deaths of servicemen.  He says his experience shows it’s not the shortening of the service term that’s to blame, but rather the more than doubling of the number of conscripts [actually, two sides of the same coin], as well as serious shortcomings in the work of some commanders.
• Then there’s the somewhat stunning case of the former chief of the Defense Ministry’s Main Directorate for Indoctrination Work (GUVR or ГУВР), General-Lieutenant Anatoliy Bashlakov.  Now Bashlakov wasn’t some old washed-up political officer.  He’s an ex-RVSN missile regiment commander turned Space Troops officer.  Apparently while commanding the Defense Ministry’s Plesetsk cosmodrome, Bashlakov accepted a 700,000-ruble bribe from a company interested in getting the base’s radioactive waste disposal contract.  Bashlakov received a pretty steep 7-year sentence.
• An officer of the Chelyabinsk voyenkomat got caught taking a 200,000-ruble bribe for falsifying someone’s military service record.
•  A conscript got crushed under BMP treads in Amur Oblast.  The armored vehicle’s commander has been charged with “violation of the rules of armored vehicle operation resulting in the death of a person through carelessness.”
• A VDV Warrant Officer named Ayrat Akbashev received a 3-year sentence for killing of one of his subordinates, a contract soldier named Artem Ovechkin.  While they were repairing a BMD, the two argued, and Akbashev threw a log being used as a prop in Ovechkin’s direction.  It hit the latter in the head, and he never regained consciousness.
• A cellphone video showing two Khabarovsk conscripts abusing a third made its way to the Internet.  You can view the somewhat sanitized version here.  Or the grittier original here.  The two guys are apparently from the Eastern MD headquarters’ security company and the guy whose head they put in the floor urinal is a conscript cook who hadn’t paid back money they lent him.  A little military loan sharking.
• A conscript from Dagestan, one Esedulla Navruzbekov, got 3.5 years for killing another conscript in the unhappy 200th Motorized Rifle Brigade in Pechenga.  Both men were in the hospital at the time, and got in a fight when Navruzbekov butted in line in the dining hall.
• A former VDV company commander in Ryazan (v / ch 41450, the 137th Parachute-Assault Regiment), Captain Mikhail Sevastyanov received a 60,000-ruble fine for extorting money and valuables from his subordinates in exchange for not reporting them to military investigators.
• A soldier named Aleksey Samokhvalov got a 50,000-ruble settlement from a court for damages after being beaten by his sergeant in a unit in Novosibirsk last year.  He originally asked the court for 400,000.