This was Russia today Monday, March 9, 2026
What looks like a corruption crackdown inside Russia’s Defense Ministry is better understood as the dismantling of one power network under pressure from the factions positioned to inherit its assets. That’s the framework political analyst Mikhail Komin laid out in a March 9 interview with Meduza journalist Vladislav Gorin, in which they discussed the arrest of former First Deputy Defense Minister Ruslan Tsalikov.
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Tsalikov spent 30 years as Sergey Shoigu’s right-hand man — following him from the Emergency Situations Ministry through a brief stint as Moscow regional deputy governor and finally to the Defense Ministry, where he oversaw procurement, property management, and Shoigu’s personal press operation. With Tsalikov’s arrest, four of Shoigu’s deputies have been investigated since the former minister was eased out in May 2024. The charges — embezzlement, money laundering, and bribery totaling 6.6 billion rubles ($84.3 million) — describe a procurement operation in which overpriced contracts for body armor, helmets, and basic supplies generated systematic kickbacks across multiple budget cycles.
How the machine works
Komin describes the Defense Ministry’s corruption architecture not as individual malfeasance but as a structured “rent chain”: a contract-signing official at the top, a bureaucrat who writes the defense contract specifications to favor predetermined winners, a preferred contractor, and a nominal executor at the bottom — each taking a cut, each potentially squealing about the whole enterprise under interrogation by federal police. When more than 70 people from the same network are under investigation, someone always talks, Komin told Meduza.
What’s new in the case against Tsalikov is the “organized criminal group” charge, which Komin reads as a legal tool rather than simply a reflection of what investigators found. Organized activity raises the sentencing ceiling to 20 years and, crucially, closes the “SVO escape hatch”: defendants charged under this statute cannot trade prison time for frontline service in Ukraine — an exit that Timur Ivanov, sentenced to 13 years last year, has been pursuing without success. The charge, Komin says, is designed to close off this loophole.
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Who wants this demolition?
Komin’s sharper argument concerns who benefits from the purge and what they’re building in its place. The old Defense Ministry operated on a relatively clean division: Shoigu’s network handled material-technical procurement (body armor, food supplies, and construction), while Rostec chief Sergey Chemezov controlled military-technical supply (weapons, equipment, and hardware). After 2022, with the war exposing failures on Shoigu’s side of that ledger, the balance shifted. Chemezov’s faction has since expanded its footprint inside the ministry, with two deputy ministers now traceable to his network (up from one).
Andrey Belousov, the economist appointed to replace Shoigu, nominally commands both sides of this division, but Chemezov’s network was there before him and operates beyond his reach. He has installed only one trusted deputy. The result is a fragmented structure of competing factions, each watching the others, none dominant. Komin’s read is that this may reduce the scale of individual extraction, but accountability is not the point. “You can’t steal as fast and as much as [shoigu] and his people did,” Komin told Meduza.
Komin doesn’t hedge:
The investigation has come too far to leave Shoigu untouched without looking arbitrary. The case has become awkward for Putin, too, with charges against a man whom Russia’s president personally decorated — Tsalikov received the Order for Service to the Fatherland, first degree, in 2020, a period during which investigators now say his criminal scheme was already active. Tsalikov’s arrest required the coordinated effort of three security agencies — military counterintelligence, the Interior Ministry, and the Investigative Committee — which Komin reads as evidence that authorization came from high up. The question is not whether investigators want to reach Shoigu but whether Putin will let them.
Komin thinks the president is still protecting Shoigu, for now. He notes that Putin bears some responsibility for the conditions that produced the Prigozhin mutiny. It was Putin, after all, who allowed Wagner Group to grow powerful enough to march on Moscow, and who let the conflict between Prigozhin and Shoigu fester until it exploded. But the Kremlin’s preferred narrative distributes that blame differently, and Komin suggests Shoigu is being held in reserve as the man who can be made to take the fall. The moment that becomes politically useful — most likely when Putin decides someone needs to answer for the army’s performance in the war’s early stages — is when Putin’s protection runs out.
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