Ex-deputy Chief Of Russian Army’s General Staff Jailed For 17 Years Over Graft 

The former deputy chief of the Russian army’s General Staff was sentenced to 17 years in prison on Monday over a scheme involving the theft of over 1 billion roubles (€10.8 million) from Defence Ministry contracts, the TASS news agency reported.

A closed-door military court found Khalil Arslanov, a colonel general, and others guilty of stealing some 1.6 billion roubles (€17.28 million) from state contracts with Voentelecom, a company that provides telecommunications services and equipment to the Russian military. 

Arslanov was also found guilty of extorting a 12 million rouble (€130,000) bribe from the head of a military communications company. 

Two other men, Colonel Pavel Kutakhov, and Igor Yakovlev, whom TASS described as a military pensioner, were found guilty alongside Arslanov and received seven and six years in prison respectively. 

A former head of the Russian military’s communications unit, Arslanov served as deputy chief of the army’s General Staff from 2013 until he was removed from office in 2020. He was named a colonel general in 2017. 

Russia has stepped up prosecutions of top defence officials as a series of corruption scandals have engulfed the highest echelons of the Russian military establishment in the past year. 

Also on Monday, former Russian Transport Minister Roman Starovoit was found dead in his car outside Moscow with a gunshot wound, in what authorities are treating as a likely suicide. The incident occurred just hours after Starovoit was dismissed from his post by Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

A presidential decree published earlier on Monday gave no reason for Starovoit’s removal after barely a year in the role. However, political analysts were quick to suggest that his dismissal may have been linked to a corruption investigation into his nearly five-year stint as governor of Russia’s western Kursk region, which borders Ukraine. 

A few months after Starovoit left his role as governor, Ukrainian troops crossed the border into Kursk in what was Kyiv’s largest foreign incursion into Russian territory since World War Two. Ukrainian forces were pushed out of Kursk earlier this year. 

Earlier this month, former deputy defence minister Timur Ivanov was sentenced to 13 years on corruption charges, the harshest sentence up to that point in the string of graft cases.