A former Russian defense official was arrested Thursday on fraud charges, in the latest high-profile arrest of a senior military official in what appears to be a wide-ranging investigation into abuse of office in the highest echelons of the military leadership.
Former Deputy Defense Minister Pavel Popov faces up to 10 years in prison if charged and convicted after being detained on suspicion of fraud, Russian state news agencies reported Thursday.
Popov’s case concerns business activities in a sprawling Moscow park sometimes called Russia’s “military Disneyland.”
Patriot Park, a hobby project of former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, is designed to inspire patriotism in Russia’s younger generations and showcases Soviet and Russian weapons. It features a shooting range, air base, museums and conference center, and a massive, khaki-colored Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, with mosaics of Soviet and Russian soldiers. Russian President Vladimir Putin personally donated money to have the main icon made for the church, the Kremlin said.
Popov is now the eighth top military official to be arrested in recent months on charges of fraud, bribery or abuse of power, including Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, who was arrested in April for bribery and later dismissed. The arrests began shortly before Putin replaced longtime Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu with an economist, Andrei Belousov. Analysts suggest the arrests are a sign that the most gross corruption will no longer be tolerated at the Ministry of Defense.
Former Deputy Defense Minister Popov was responsible for the development and maintenance of Patriot Park and is accused of renovating his own properties in the Moscow region at the park’s expense, Tass reported. He is accused of fraud along with the park’s director and Maj. Gen. Vladimir Shesterov, deputy of the Defense Ministry’s innovation department, both of whom already arrested.
Popov forced companies that had contracts with Patriot Park to carry out work on his “outside-of-town apartments without paying for them,” Svetlana Petrenko of Russia’s Investigative Committee told state news agency Tass.
In addition to a plot of land with houses outside Moscow, Popov and his family own “numerous properties in prestigious areas of Moscow, the Moscow region and the Krasnodar region” in southern Russia, Petrenko said. The properties are worth a total of 500 million rubles ($5.5 million), and investigators are determining whether they were acquired legally, Petrenko told Tass.
Popov was deputy defense minister from 2013 until June of this year, when he was dismissed by presidential decree. His arrest follows on the heels of former deputy defense minister General Dmitry Bulgakov, who detained in Moscow in July.
According to Tass, Bulgakov is accused of large-scale embezzlement. He reportedly oversaw the creation of a system to provide Russian troops with low-quality food rations at inflated prices. If found guilty, he faces up to 10 years in prison.
Bulgakov was deputy defense minister from 2008 until September 2022, when he was dismissed. He was responsible for logistics at the time and although the ministry had said he would take another job, the move was seen as punishment for deficiencies in support operations in Ukraine.
