Category Archives: Crime and Corruption

The Defense Ministry’s Corruption Poll

Posted on January 27, 2010 | Leave a comment

Vladimir Mukhin talked about military corruption with Defense Ministry sociologist and pollster Captain First Rank Leonid Peven for today’s Nezavisimaya gazeta.

President Medvedev apparently ordered a study of corruption in the armed forces, and the Defense Ministry conducted a six-month poll, the results of which are reportedly uninspiring to say the least.  Peven wouldn’t talk about the specific results of the polling, saying work on the findings is ongoing.  But he indicated that each district, fleet, and branch of service would be assigned a ‘corruption index.’  Let’s hope–in the interests of fairness–that each armed service, each main directorate, each directorate, etc., gets an index as well.

Not surprisingly, an unnamed official source admits that the poll’s results confirm what the Defense Ministry already knows–as the GVP constantly says, there’s a general tendency toward higher levels of corruption-related crime and law-breaking in the officer corps.

The source also said the Kremlin is especially worried by armed forces corruption, and this poll was one of the largest and most unusual pieces of social research undertaken by the Defense Ministry in recent times.  The Defense Ministry’s sociologists and pollsters have typically been used to monitor military living standards.  A former uniformed sociologist said, however, that his colleagues could not get objective data on corruption in the armed forces by themselves.  Civilian experts at places like VTsIOM and Levada-Center need to be involved.

The formation of a new officer’s corporate ethos at this year’s 3rd All-Army Officers Assembly is supposed to be an answer to the scourge of military corruption, but the Chairman of the All-Russian Professional Union of Servicemen Oleg Shvedkov advises more practical measures like increasing the material well-being of officers as well as severe, but just, personnel policies.

One veteran adds that the leadership can create codes and rules of conduct, but they froze military base pay and pension increases for 2010, while other social groups haven’t similarly been done out of their supplements.  And you can’t beat corruption in the army with that kind of attitude toward men in shoulderboards.

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Military Housing-Corruption Nexus

Posted on January 27, 2010 | Leave a comment

Grani.ru has connected the dots between–on the one hand–former Defense Ministry housing chief General-Colonel Filippov’s sudden retirement on health grounds late in triumphant 2009 just as military men were receiving more than 45,000 apartments, and–on the other hand–GVP Sergey Fridinskiy’s announcement yesterday that military housing is one of the three largest military corruption problems and that an SU-155 affiliate is under investigation for not fulfilling state contracts to provide apartments to Defense Ministry servicemen. 

But hold this thought for a moment.  First, remember the Defense Ministry’s end-of-year housing claims:

“The RF Defense Ministry, continuing implementation of decisions of the country’s leadership regarding providing servicemen permanent housing, planned in the course of 2009 to acquire from all sources 45,400 apartments.  Updated data on last year’s results allows us to talk about overfulfillment of the planned tasks.”

The Defense Ministry’s Press-Service and Information Directorate went on to specify:  45,614 permanent apartments, of which the Defense Ministry built 5,117, bought 19,147, and used GZhS for 7,050.  Another 14,300 were obtained from other sources, specifically through investment contracts and resettling apartments [i.e. moving new residents into existing Defense Ministry apartments].

From what Fridinskiy said in his interview yesterday, Grani.ru concludes that Filippov was dismissed for violating laws concerning housing for servicemen, including signing occupancy documents for nonexistent apartment blocks:

“Filippov signed an order for the distribution of apartments in eight buildings in the Moscow suburb of Chekhov.  However these buildings exist only on paper.  Their construction isn’t really under way, having stopped at the foundation.  The Defense Ministry contract was grossly violated by the contracting firm.”

Here’s what Fridinskiy said:

“…instances of the distribution of living space in buildings which not only haven’t been put into use, but actually aren’t even built, are being brought to us.  We’re investigating violations in housing construction for servicemen in Chekhov, where through the fault of the contractor ZAO ‘Moscow Oblast Investment-Construction Company,’ which is part of ZAO ‘SU-155,’ not one of 8 signed state contracts has been fulfilled.  Construction of apartment buildings to this point ranges in states from ‘installing pilings’–simply put,  digging the foundation–to ‘framing the building.’  Despite this, in August 2009, former Defense Ministry chief of housing and installations, Deputy RF Defense Minister General-Colonel Filippov approved the plan for distributing apartments to servicemen in these, if you’ll permit me to say, buildings.”

Were the ‘apartments’ in these 8 unfinished ‘buildings’ counted as part of the 45,614 supposedly acquired in 2009?  Of the 14,300 supposedly obtained through other means, including investment contracts?  Doesn’t look like these contracts panned out too well.  One wonders how much farther the Defense Ministry’s claim of success in meeting Putin’s task will unravel.  As it was storming to try and finish late in the year, many respected sources claimed something less than 30,000 apartments had actually been acquired.

But a scapegoat has been found in Filippov; he can take any other blame that needs to be assigned.  Perhaps he can borrow General-Colonel Vlasov’s sidearm.

Grani.ru reminds that Fridinskiy didn’t say anything about charges against Filippov; he could get off with just a scare.  But, with Filippov’s signature, state funds could move along the chain to the contracting firm.  So billions are thrown at military housing, but the problem is never solved.  Now one of Serdyukov’s Petersburg comrades is responsible for housing, but rather than say anything about how he plans to clean up the housing and installation service, he just had polite words to say about his predecessor.

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Fridinskiy’s Latest Military Corruption Report

Posted on January 26, 2010 | Leave a comment

Sergey Fridinskiy (photo: photoxpress)

An Interfaks reporter has interviewed Main Military Prosecutor (GVP) Sergey Fridinskiy for the pages of today’s Izvestiya. 

Not surprisingly, Fridinskiy didn’t really bite when asked if the GVP had any hand in the recent Defense Ministry cadre ‘revolution.’  He said the GVP keeps its hands on its part [i.e. law enforcement]. 

Fridinskiy says the GVP monitored the implementation of the ‘new profile.’  In some places, it went more or less normally, but in others, it got out of hand and there were mass violations of servicemen’s rights, like putting 600 men in a barracks for 300.  So the prosecutor reacts to such a situation.  Fridinskiy said the GVP gave quarterly reports on violations to the Defense Minister. 

Asked about the military’s involvement in the tragic ‘Lame Horse’ club fire in Perm, Fridinskiy said the chief and chief engineer of the KECh which was responsible for the property were aware of what was going on there and might have been getting a cut, but the fact that they allowed gross fire safety violations resulting in a tragedy with many victims is what resulted in the investigation and criminal case against them.  He indicated the KECh chief died in the fire, and they are investigating whether the chief engineer got bribes.  Fridinskiy noted other responsible military officials in the district got disciplinary punishment. 

On the ‘Steppe’ garrison boiler house case, Fridinskiy revealed that state inspectors looked at it in May or June and declared it unfit for use, but the locals did cosmetic repairs and used it anyway.  He says other districts and garrisons, especially Kostroma, are being inspected.  He believes old equipment is largely to blame, but it’s up to the GVP to force people to do their jobs and not let the situation reach the point of an accident. 

Fridinskiy termed the general crime situation in the armed forces as stable, with some favorable points.  Registered offenses were down 16 percent in 2009 against the year before.  The numbers of grievous and especially grievous crimes were down.  These figures were for all uniformed power ministries, not just the armed forces.  Dedovshchina looked like it would continue a significant decline, but actually ended up increasing by 2 percent.

Asked to address the reported interethnic Baltic Fleet incident, involving Slavs and Caucasians, Fridinskiy said:

“As a rule, we’re talking not about interethnic fights, but interpersonal conflicts.  For us it’s just accepted:  if a Slav gives it to another Slav based on appearance, then this is simply a fight.  But if the very same thing happens with a Caucasian participating, then another hue appears here, even though the fight is based, as a rule, on a normal everyday situation.  However taking into account the mentality of southerners, who’re inclined to stick together, a fight between two guys grows into a group fight, and the appearance of an interethnic conflict comes up.  When the affair goes to criminal responsibility for nonregulation relations, an ethnic motive doesn’t figure in.  But rumors continue to pressurize the circumstances.”

Fridinskiy claims that in the group of ‘barracks hooligans’ in the Kaliningrad garrison there were both North Caucasians and Slavs [but were they part of the same group or in different groups?].  He said 8 were charged in the incident, and some have already been convicted.

Asked about crime among higher officers, Fridinskiy says malfeasance, exceeding authority, and fraud were the biggest offenses.  Eight generals [probably from all power ministries] were convicted and six got prison terms from 3 to 5 years.  He said the theft of state money was greatest in the GOZ, RDT&E, and housing programs.  He indicates he’s investigating 8 cases where apartments didn’t get built by the SU-155 construction firm, despite the fact there were state contracts in place for them.

Fridinskiy seems to indicate he registered 1,500 crimes among senior officers in 2009 [as of late October, he had this number at a little less than 900].

As for how to fix the crime situation in the military, Fridinskiy doesn’t offer much advice beyond using the law.  Of course, that gives him lots of business.

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Posted in Crime and Corruption, Law, Order, and Discipline, Military Law, Serdyukov's Reforms

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You’ll Be Missed, Mr. Kanshin

Posted on January 26, 2010 | Leave a comment

Aleksandr Kanshin

Press reports yesterday and today say that Mr. Kanshin and his commission have been dropped from the composition of Russia’s Public Chamber (OP) in 2010.

Kanshin is the ex-zampolit and board chairman of the MEGAPIR empire–the National Association of Armed Forces Reserve Officer Organizations, who for several years chaired the OP’s Commission on the Affairs of Veterans, Servicemen, and Family Members.

Kanshin and his commission served as a loyal, but objective and critical, voice when it came to the Defense Ministry and its policies.  His loss, and especially the loss of the commission altogether, is quite a blow against independent information on what’s occurring inside the armed forces.  It means one less critic the Arbat military district will have to fend off.

It will be interesting to see who and why someone got rid of them.  Also, what will come of Kanshin; he’ll probably stay engaged on military and defense issues, but probably without the same kind of access and platform for his views.

Mr. Kanshin particularly followed premilitary fitness and training, manpower, conscription, ‘social protection’ issues, the OPK, and dedovshchina and hazing problems.  He frequently visited the MDs.

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Posted in Crime and Corruption, Defense Industry, Law, Order, and Discipline, Serdyukov's Reforms

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Will the Army Survive the Reforms of 2009?

Posted on January 21, 2010 | Leave a comment

Military commentator Anatoliy Tsyganok gives some of his familiar answers to this question in Polit.ru.

He lists three important factors that will determine the state of Russia’s defenses over the next 10-15 years (without necessarily fully exploring each):  information security, demographics, and weapons development.

He’d like to see “information troops” as a branch of the armed forces.  Not sure he could write his columns if they existed the way he describes them.  More interestingly, he asserts, by 2011-2012, the number of 18-year-old Russian males will be less than the number of conscript billets in the armed forces.  So something has to give.

Then Tsyganok spins off into a variety of interesting and familiar directions.

Regarding the shift to 3 levels of command, Tsyganok maintains it doesn’t improve the control over forces and it actually reduces combat readiness.  He questions whether the MD can transform itself from an administrative command into a warfighting front under modern conditions when it will have little time and may already be under attack.  Later he gives officer manning figures for the old regiments vs. the new brigades.  The former had 252 officers and more than 100 warrants against 900-1,800 soldiers and sergeants.  The latter has 135 officers against as many as 3,800 troops, so control is worse.

On the issue of tanks, Tsyganok says the reduced reliance on tanks might be right for a small war in the Caucasus, but a larger tank force remains useful elsewhere since not every war will be of the local variety.  With only 2,000 tanks, Russia would have only 285 for each MD and the KSDR, or 2 brigades and an independent battalion’s worth for each.

Tsyganok says the U.S. Army’s ratio of combat to combat support brigades is 1:3 and Russia’s is 1:0.88, leaving the latter deficient in combat support.  Without adequate combat support, the Russian brigade can’t cover the same kind of territory as its American counterpart, according to him.

Nor is the Russian brigade terribly mobile.  Tsyganok says, in Zapad-2009, one brigade rail marched 450 km in 7 days, while he claims a Chinese regiment exercising at the same time covered 2,400 km in 5 days.

Tsyganok is not impressed by Russia’s armaments program.  He asks why Russia should build new ships when it can’t maintain what it’s got.  He claims Russia’s ‘new’ corvettes will be outfitted with 20-year-old weapons.  Tsyganok complains that updating the electronics on 30-year-old Su-24, Su-25, and Su-27 aircraft doesn’t produce sufficiently combat capable platforms for today.

Turning to training and education, he runs through the familiar and modest results for 2009 (60 percent of the ‘new profile’ brigades got satisfactory evaluations) and reductions in the number of officers studying at the Combined Arms and General Staff Academies.

Tsyganok then tackles the formation of OAO Oboronservis to replace most of the army’s rear services.  According to him, it is quite a behemoth valued at perhaps more than a trillion rubles or 2-3 percent of Russia’s GDP.  He cites VVS CINC Zelin’s criticism of the high cost of capital aircraft repairs by its Aviaremont holding.

On military housing, Tsyganok says, the Defense Ministry’s claims notwithstanding, servicemen received less than 30,000 apartments in 2009.

He ends by discussing military corruption, which he describes as theft which knows no limits.  Officially, losses from economic crimes in the armed forces amounted to 2.5 billion rubles in 2009, adding to the 2.2 billion in 2008.

Tsyganok says:

“The prosecutor and other law enforcement mainly fight against low-level corruption, but they don’t touch its ‘apex.’  To increase the number of cases uncovered, they seize on rank and file corruption, but they don’t conduct a systematic fight against corruption in the ranks of the highest leadership.  Attempts to create special control organs still haven’t brought success:  in a thoroughly corrupt system, uncorrupted structures either don’t work or else quickly become corrupted themselves.  To ‘purge’ the main corrupt people, political will is needed, and we still don’t have it.”

It will be interesting to see if there is some kind of move against corruption in the Defense Ministry and other high places in the armed forces, as rumored during last week’s command changes.  The rumor probably shouldn’t be believed until some solid evidence appears.

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Posted in Command and Control, Crime and Corruption, Force Modernization, Serdyukov's Reforms

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Poor Return on Defense Ministry Auctions

Posted on January 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

 On 10 January, Interfaks-AVN reported that the Defense Ministry has sent the federal budget a fraction of an expected 10 billion rubles in proceeds from sales of its property in 2009, according to a Federation Council committee source.  The Audit Chamber expected 10.6 billion rubles, but only 1.5 billon has been forwarded to the budget.  The income was supposed to come from the sale of vacant land, unused property, and excess equipment.  So, either the sales did not produce the anticipated profits or corruption in the Defense Ministry drained them away.  The source said there was accurate accounting of what was to be sold, and what should be gained from the sales, and so there’s an obvious temptation to steal.

 In a November Duma roundtable, the Deputy Chairman of the Defense Committee, Mikhail Babich said:

“Corrupt practices in the army and navy increase every year, not least because of the Defense Ministry’s noncore functions.  At present the Defence Ministry itself takes stock of its noncore assets, values them itself, and sells military property, land, real estate, and entire military cantonments itself. Is this really the Defense Ministry’s function?  Why doesn’t the Defense Ministry hand its noncore assets over to the Federal Agency for the Management of State Property and the government, for a subsequent sale in accordance with the law?”

It doesn’t because pretty early on Defense Minister Serdyukov won a battle to keep this right inside his department.

Nezavisimaya gazeta’s Vladimir Mukhin picked up on this story yesterday.  He concludes right off that Serdyukov’s ambitious plans to profit from unused Defense Ministry property turned into a fiasco.  He notes the Defense Ministry hasn’t made a secret of this, saying on its auction site that more than half of planned auctions didn’t occur because of the lack of applications to participate.

Mukhin quotes Aleksandr Kanshin, chairman of the Public Chamber’s veterans, servicemen, and families committee, saying the unmet plan for selling excess military property (VVI) is more or less connected with last year’s economic crisis, but from the other side, it’s not really the Defense Ministry’s business to be salesman for state property, and military men have no experience, personnel, or resources for this.  Another interlocutor says there have been significant instances of corruption arising in the sale of VVI.

Simultaneously, the Defense Ministry’s Personnel Inspectorate and the Main Military Prosecutor (GVP) have launched a widespread anticorruption inspection under orders from Serdyukov.  The inspection covers Defense Ministry directorates, the armed services, branches, military districts, and fleets.  A law enforcement source told Interfaks the inspection aims to prevent crimes by officers and generals and will continue until 1 March.

The source said corruption and other offenses by several generals and senior officers had already been uncovered, and the central attestation commission might relieve them of their duties.  Offenses were noted in the VVS, VDV, Railroad Troops, and Ground Troops.

More than 40 percent of offenses by officers involved the theft of property or funds, and crime by senior officers is rising.  The GVP reported damages to the state from military corruption exceeded 2.5 billion rubles.

Krasnaya zvezda’s interview with the MVO military prosecutor is quite astounding.  He says he’s been implementing the national anticorruption plan since 2008, using an interdepartmental group, including “state security organ employees in the troops” [FSB officers] and command representatives.  So, in 2009, prosecutors and FSB officers investigated 190 cases.  Based on these, they gave commands 200 reports leading to disciplinary action against more than 300 “responsible parties.”  More than 130 investigations were directed to the “military-investigative organs” [the military section of the Investigative Committee or SK].  More than 100 criminal corruption cases were developed.  He credits the system of coordination among the “organs” involved.  But corruption sometimes has a very organized character.  He cites the loss of 128 million rubles to a corruption ring of officers from the Defense Ministry’s “central apparatus,” the apartment management directorate and staff of the MVO who stole and sold 140 vehicles and pieces of equipment in 2005-2008.

Mukhin gives some attention to the GVP’s figures too.  He adds that the GVP uncovered 1,500 corruption crimes in the ‘power’ ministries as a whole in 2009.  Every other case was either aggravated, or especially aggravated.  In 70 percent of cases, officers were the culprits.  In the GVP, they say that dishonest military commanders are making a fortune on auctions and contract bidding.

Mukhin then reminds everyone that it was Prime Minister Putin who, in late 2008, gave the Defense Ministry the right to handle its own VVI, rather than the Federal Agency for the Management of State Property.

Commenting for Grani.ru, Vladimir Temnyy also blames Putin for letting the Defense Ministry run these auctions.  The first thing Serdyukov intended was to inventory and get rid of noncore property and functions which lead generals to embezzle state funds, but this has apparently happened anyway since 9 billion rubles are missing.  So why wasn’t somebody like Serdyukov, as everyone expected, able to pull off a successful process of shedding VVI and benefiting the state.  Two reasons–the crisis and theft by his subordinates surpassing all conceivable limits.  Could the reformer become a victim of his own trust in his people?  The state won’t get the money back anyway because it’s already gone into fabulous suburban homes occupied by modest colonels and generals, according to Temnyy.  So the sale of VVI has raised military living standards after all, at least for some.

Recall also that Nikolay Poroskov said one source told him the recent command changes weren’t just about age and rotations, a third reason was the results of the personnel [and GVP?] inspection above.

Also, there’s the talk about devising a new “officer’s honor code.”  Certainly, it will prohibit corruption.  Can’t be a coincidence.

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Posted in Command and Control, Crime and Corruption, Law, Order, and Discipline, Military Law