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Russia’s attorney general said on Monday that detections of corruption among officials have increased this year, with a 30% increase in bribery cases compared to 2023.
Igor Krasnov told state media that in 2024, almost 30,000 Russian officials were arrested and punished for violating anti-graft rules.
Of that total, 500 were fired due to “loss of trust,” Krasnov said.
Krasnov said at least half of all corruption cases involved bribery and nearly 19,000 such crimes were discovered in the first nine months of 2024.
That’s almost as many as the 20,300 bribery cases his office found in 2023, Krasnov added.
“This year, the number of such crimes has increased by more than 30%, to more than 6,600 cases,” he said.
According to KrasnovIn the past five years, about 760 billion rubles worth of money and property have been seized from officials accused of corruption. That’s worth about $7.6 billion today.
About 200 companies were fined in the first half of 2024 for trying to bribe officials, the attorney general also said.
Analysts at the Washington-based think tank Institute for the Study of War said systemic corruption in Russia is likely to worsen the economic burden of fighting the war in Ukraine.
“Russia’s increasing economic pressure as a result of the war, combined with widespread corruption, labor shortages and inefficiencies in the Russian DIB, will likely increase the costs of the Russian war and undermine Russia’s ability to effectively support DIB operations with further undermine the preservation of economic stability,” the newspaper wrote. ISW.
DIB refers to the defense industrial base, a network of companies and manufacturers that supply governments with weapons and military equipment.
The ruble has already weakened significantly since the start of the war and now trades at around 100 against the US dollar, compared to around 75 against the dollar before March 2022. With international sanctions closing in on Russia, the country’s leader, Vladimir Putin, has has stimulated its economy and government expenditure heavily focused on defense production, recruitment and payments to troop families.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin Saturday estimated that Russia has ‘wasted’ more than 200 billion dollars on the invasion of Ukraine.
“Russia has paid a staggering price for Putin’s folly,” Austin said at the Reagan National Defense Forum.
He also said the war has killed or injured at least 700,000 Russian troops.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has historically struggled with corruption. While the extent of corruption within the organization is difficult to determine, it sometimes surfaces when top officials are ousted.
For example, in June, five senior Russian military figures, including a former deputy defense minister, were arrested on corruption charges.
The indictment came shortly after Sergei Shoigu, the country’s former defense minister, was replaced.
Some analysts, such as Mark Galeotti, a senior researcher at the think tank Royal United Services Institute, told us Business Insider at the time that they believed the arrests could be related to Shoigu’s replacement.
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