Putin’s purge of his top generals

In the past month, Vladimir Putin has had five top generals arrested on corruption charges. More are likely to follow in what looks like a gathering purge by the Federal Security Service (FSB). ‘There is a fierce clean-up under way,’ a source close to the Kremlin told the Moscow Times last week. ‘There is still a long way to go before the purges are finished. More arrests await us.’

Without doubt, the FSB will find plenty of the corruption it’s looking for. Timur Ivanov, Russia’s deputy defence minister – the first senior general arrested – was hardly shy about flaunting his wealth.

An investigation by the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation in 2022 found ample evidence by looking no further than the social media accounts of Ivanov’s wife. They featured a stream of photos of the couple on luxury holidays, as well as a birthday party featuring a three-tiered cake decorated with gold hand grenades, bullets and diamonds.

Several photos show Ivanov drinking with Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov (bizarrely dressed in a bear costume) along with his former boss Sergei Shoigu, the veteran defence minister ousted soon after Ivanov’s arrest. Digging a little deeper, the Navalny team found pictures of Ivanov’s neoclassical estate outside Moscow, as well as a bank transfer for €90,000 for a week-long charter of a yacht in August 2013 (presumably a celebration of Ivanov’s appointment to head the Defence Ministry’s construction division, Oboronstroi).

The epic scale of the theft by Russia’s government officials – and the vulgarity and shamelessness of how they show off their ill-gotten gains – is beyond parody. Massive graft has also long been considered standard operating procedure for the Kremlin’s kleptocratic elite. Corruption is the glue that holds Putin’s so-called power vertical together.