From the editor
Ukrainians are unlikely to care much about the speculation over the reasons for a series of arrests of high-ranking Russian Defence Ministry officials when their villages and towns are being razed to the ground by invading troops and missiles are raining down on civilians daily. Kharkiv Oblast has again borne the brunt of Russia’s ongoing murder spree this week. A video from Vovchansk showed the scale of the destruction of the town, with the dead bodies of civilians lying in the streets. Kharkiv itself was struck multiple times, with people killed at a children’s playground and a publishing house.
Russian troops have laid waste to the town of Vovchansk in Kharkiv Oblast
On the pretext of arresting officials for corruption and fraud the Kremlin has been conducting an obvious purge of the Defence Ministry, which is now headed by former First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov. Yesterday Valery Gerasimov’s deputy Lt. Gen. Vadim Shamarin was arrested on a charge of large-scale bribery, and a military official overseeing procurement, Vladimir Verteletsky, was arrested dramatically. Some of the other victims of the sweep so far include Deputy Defence Minister Timur Ivanov, Lt. Gen. Yuri Kuznetsov, who oversaw the department’s personnel section – both arrested on bribery charges - and Maj. Gen. Ivan Popov, the former commander of the 58th Combined Arms Army, arrested on a fraud charge.
While this may look like an effort to improve the conduct of the war, the Moscow Times spoke to sources who said it is a power struggle in which the FSB is attempting to take control of the Defence Ministry’s resources. The FSB will want to pin the blame for military failures on the generals while deflecting any accusations against the security services for massively underestimating the determination of Ukraine and its allies, the paper said. The chaos could potentially be good news for Ukraine, if Russian authorities are caught up in their own infighting. But it clearly has not yet slowed down the killing juggernaut. Far bigger upheaval would be needed in Russia to bring the slaughter to a halt, even temporarily.
As can be seen in Iran, where the death of President Ebrahim Raisi and his foreign minister in a helicopter crash has barely shaken the regime, changes in personnel are hardly relevant when there are so many similar thugs waiting to take the place of those who fall out of favour or meet an unfortunate end. The crash again raised the question of what would happen if Vladimir Putin suddenly died. Would NATO and EU leaders express their condolences as they did with Raisi, who was known as the Butcher of Tehran because of the number of political prisoners he executed? Would a top official such as Belousov slide into Putin’s seat or would it be more like the dark farce depicted in The Death of Stalin? We will have to wait and see, while Ukraine burns.
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Long sentences handed down for pro-Ukraine activities
A military court has sentenced 36-year-old barman from Moscow Oblast Vladimir Malina to 25 years in prison for allegedly setting fire to a railway relay cabinet. He was convicted of terrorism and sabotage charges and accused of being part of the Freedom of Russia Legion that is fighting for Ukraine. There have been numerous cases in Russia of people being convicted of setting fire to relay cabinets.
A military court in Novosibirsk has sentenced 24-year-old IT specialist Ilya Baburin to 25 years in prison on terrorism and treason charges for allegedly attempting to set fire to a military recruiting office. Baburin was arrested in September 2022 after someone threw two Molotov cocktails threw the window of the recruiting office in Novosibirsk, causing a small fire that was quickly extinguished. During a search of his home a copy of the book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was found, which led prosecutors to accuse Baburin of sympathising with Nazism and Ukraine’s far-right Azov battalion.
An employee of the Perm city administration, 42-year-old Anton Galet, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for planning treason, planning a terrorist attack and justifying terrorism. The FSB claimed that in 2022 Galet collaborated with the Ukrainian military in planning sabotage and terrorist attacks against industrial and law-enforcement facilities in Perm.
A military court in Rostov-on-Don has sentenced 21-year-old Mikhail Balabanov to 4 ½ years in prison for allegedly planning a terrorist attack in Stavropol Krai. Balabanov admitted that he had been in a conversation with a Russian intelligence agent but denied the accusation that he intended to commit an arson attack at a military recruiting office. He received military call-up papers in 2022 after graduating from a college in Kazan and appealed for help from the “I Want to Live” group. He then started communicating via Telegram with someone he thought was from Ukrainian military intelligence, who in fact worked for the FSB. The person promised to help Balabanov leave Russia if he took photographs of the recruiting office where he was eventually entrapped.
Physicist sentenced for treason
A court in St. Petersburg has sentenced 77-year-old physicist Anatoly Maslov to 14 years in prison for allegedly giving information about hypersonic technology to German intelligence in 2014. Maslov, the former chief researcher at the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in Novosibirsk, was only arrested in 2022 and all details of the case were kept secret. Maslov’s colleague, 76-year-old Alexander Kuranov, was sentenced to seven years in prison for treason last month after testifying against him.