Yesterday, Timur Ivanov participated in the board meeting of the Russian Ministry of Defense.
It might be the last time for a very long time that he sat in a comfortable chair.
Shortly after the meeting, Ivanov, Russia’s deputy defense minister, was arrested on suspicion of accepting large bribes.
On Wednesday 24 April, 49-year-old Timur Ivanov was detained together with a contractor. Photos from the court show him in the accused’s cage. He was detained for two months.
Ivanov has lived surprisingly expensively for many years together with his wife Svetlana. So expensive that Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation audited his spending on jewels, watches, cars, real estate and published the data on social media. An example is a house that was rented in France for 170,000 Euro per month, equivalent to two million kroner.
Highest responsibility
So how to interpret the event?
Ivanov is the minister with highest responsibility for all construction within the Ministry of Defence. Think airfields, field churches, hospitals, military academies, preschools and just about every other military facility in Russia from east to west. He also received a special assignment to rebuild the bombed and occupied Mariupol. On television, he stood and pointed to the ruins after his own bombings and said that “here there will be a large swimming pool” that everyone will be able to use. Is his greed too obvious perhaps?
The EU has issued sanctions against him as responsible for the invasion of Ukraine.
Kompromat
Timur Ivanov has long spent ten or a hundred times more than he earned.
TASS dryly writes in its account that Defense Minister Shoigu was informed of that arrest, and that President Putin received a review of the case in advance.
The Russian term ‘kompromat’ means that someone has a hold on one. Most often, this means that one or more of the security services have images or information about a person that can be used as blackmail – known examples are surreptitiously taken pictures of a naked public prosecutor with two prostitutes.
In the TASS account, which may seem misleadingly similar to a text from a news agency in a democratic country, it is pointed out that Timur Ivanov was the deputy head of the Moscow region in 2012 when Sergei Shoigu was its governor.
The Russian news agency shows how Ivanov followed Shojgu’s career for many years.
But TASS writes nothing about Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman.
Images from social media and email conversations published by the now-deceased Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption network. The picture where Ivanov and Peskov, dressed as a bear, toast each other is perhaps a special kind of ‘kompromat’?
To be continued, rest assured.