Even our military no longer know how fighting the Russian army is.
It all began in Bashkiria, near the village of Urman, where artillery ammunition exploded for seven days in a row. As a result, the state of emergency without a shelter left more than 100 people whose homes were badly hit by explosions. The total material damage, according to preliminary data, exceeds 100 million rubles.A few days later, about the same incident happened already in the military warehouses of the neighboring Udmurt Republic, where the arsenal rushed near the village of Pugachevo. Hundreds of ammunition were detonated, dozens of houses and people were seriously injured. The damage caused by this explosion is still being calculated ...
We do not know what the conclusions will be reached by the responsible persons who investigate the incident that happened. So far, one thing is clear - these explosions have become a completely natural phenomenon against the background of the mess that is happening now in the Ministry of Defense.
Therefore, the main blame for the state of emergency can be safely placed on our chief military commander, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov.
Reform ugliness
This person, who had recently been selling furniture in St. Petersburg, came to the office of 2007 in February as the Minister of Defense. They say that Serdyukov is obliged by his father-in-law to such a rapid career, the current Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, who has long been on friendly terms with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev.
Whatever it was, during the short time in office as Minister Serdyukov managed to hate a huge number of soldiers and officers of the Russian army. And it was for that!
Having just taken up his post, the new minister publicly announced the beginning of a new military reform, called upon, in his words, to bring our army to the present level and increase its combat readiness. The war in South Ossetia in August 2008 eloquently speaks of how this “combat readiness” increased.
Here is what is said about Serdyukov in an open address to the Union of Russian Paratroopers to the President of the country:
“Serdyukov has no authority either among the troops, or among the veterans, or among the population. Young people do not want to serve under the authority of such a minister. He showed the inability to lead troops in forcing Georgia to peace. We remember how the president of the country "told" the Minister of Defense about the course of hostilities and the development of operations, and not vice versa. "
It is not surprising that chaos reigned in command and control of troops, especially in the first hours of hostilities. Hence, the disproportionately large losses suffered by our army during the entire military operation are quite understandable.
However, the minister himself blamed everything ... on the “obsolete military structure” of our Armed Forces, which allegedly does not meet modern requirements. He decided to rectify the situation in a very original way - the general reduction of the army began.
To date, according to experts of the State Duma Defense Committee, the number of military units in the Air Force and the Navy has been halved navy. Strategic missile forces are cut by a third, and parts of the airborne forces - by 20 percent. But the main blow of the minister fell on the Ground Forces.
Army divisions and other large formations were eliminated. Their personnel were reduced to separate brigades, which, according to the minister’s assurances, were supposedly more mobile and combat-ready than the former large structures.
However, earlier this year, the General Staff reported to the president that more than 60 percent of these brigades ... are not combat ready! That is, no reinforcement of our army, contrary to the vigorous statements of Serdyukov, in reality did not happen. And all the “reform” has come down to the banal reduction of people and technology. Moreover, not only army units, but also think tanks of our Armed Forces went "under the knife of reform". This is what military analyst Maxim Khrustalev writes about this:
“It was at the suggestion of the minister that military high schools and academies, research bases and training grounds were closed and“ reformed ”. Refresher courses were liquidated, the Center for Military Strategic Studies at the General Staff was destroyed. And in recent years, recruitment of cadets to military schools has been stopped altogether. ”
After this, the rather pessimistic assessment of our entire military system, which General Chief of Staff General Nikolai Makarov gave to journalists, looks quite logical: “Over the past two decades we have failed to bring the art of war to the modern level and continue to live with outdated standards ...”.
This raises a logical question - what, then, does the Minister of Defense deal with in his department?
How nice to be a general
Apparently, Serdyukov, as a former trader, is more concerned with the sale and privatization of the property of the Armed Forces, released after mass reductions and other reorganizations. We are talking about military real estate in a number of large cities of Russia, such as Nizhny Novgorod, landfills and airfields, which, after the elimination of the relevant military units, can be sold (or rented) for cottage construction or for other commercial use. Probably for this, in fact, Serdyuk's “military reform” was started.
It is curious that the minister brought with him to the military department a number of people who worked with him in the commercial field. Thus, a certain Leonid Sorokko, who had previously been the owner of a construction company in St. Petersburg, was appointed head of the Main Directorate of Capital Construction of the Ministry of Defense. Practically the whole military construction budget, equal to hundreds of millions of rubles, passes through this structure of the ministry.
Two more St. Petersburg businessmen, Lev Vinnik and Alexander Gorbunov, became Serdyukov’s chief advisers on the exploitation of military property. It is said that they are the ones who are developing plans for a grand privatization of the Ministry of Defense facilities in the Russian capital: for this, they are literally pushing the General Staff of the Navy, the Peter the Great Academy and other military institutions outside Moscow.
Traders close to the minister supervise all military supplies, from various material means to weapon systems. About how are these very supplies, recently told the journalists of the analytical website "FLB.ru":
“In March, the 2010 of the year at the board of the Ministry of Defense, the Main Military Prosecutor’s Office reported that in 2009, during government procurement in the field of state defense orders, the state was damaged in 1 by a billion rubles. But an informed source in the Ministry of Defense believes that the corruption picture looks even darker: it is unclear how at least 50 percent of the funds allocated for arms purchases are spent. And this is only a year - more than 200 billion rubles! ”.
And yet, as many experts believe, law enforcement agencies should be interested in the fact of the complete failure of the state program to recruit the army with contract soldiers. The program failed due to the low wages offered to professional soldiers, poor social security, housing insecurity, etc. Surprisingly, the state allocated a substantial amount for the program - almost 100 billion rubles, which, as it turned out, went nowhere.
You must admit that it is unlikely that this clearly corrupt squandering of state funds took place without the knowledge of the highest officials of the Ministry of Defense.
Military secrets
In general, corruption in the ranks of the Armed Forces acquired under the Minister of Serdyukov just unprecedented scope. According to the chief military prosecutor Sergei Fridinsky, in recent years, crime among the commanders has reached a level that threatens the security of the country.
I will cite only some glaring examples.
In the summer of 2009, it became known that the Ministry of Defense had purchased thousands of defective parachutes for the Airborne Forces, a total of millions of rubles for 280. Investigators of the military prosecutor's office managed to disrupt the deal only at the last moment.
“Cunning entrepreneurs produced these parachutes not from new raw materials, but from old parts. Representatives of the army customer and the military representative closed their eyes to this disinterested. Studies conducted by specialists have shown that these parachutes cannot be used, ”the prosecutor Fridinsky told reporters.
According to him, the supply of old, decommissioned products under the guise of new - the most common practice of embezzlement of budget money in law enforcement agencies. Scam officers buy for the troops not only old parachutes, but also decommissioned ammunition, old parts for airplanes and helicopters, cracked helmets, body armor, which have only new matter, and sometimes metal plates under it ... not at all! And if there are plates, they are of such quality that the machine gun bursts them through with 50 steps.
And after all, all this goes not only to the rear units, but also to those that conduct military operations in hot spots!
May 2011 of the year. Pilots of the military aviation center, located near Lipetsk, openly accused the leadership of this center of systematically extorting money from them - the pilots had to give their superiors special flight bonus. According to some data, the total amount of extortionists in uniform, who collected tribute from four flight squadrons at once, reached 7 - 10 million rubles a year.
Now in this case is carried out a special check.
June 2011 of the year. A criminal case has been initiated against the head of the Main Military Medical Department of the Ministry of Defense, Major General Alexander Belevitin, and the Head of the 2 Division of the same Department, Colonel Alexei Nikitin. They are suspected of receiving a bribe in the amount of 4,7 million rubles from one company that received a lucrative contract for the supply of medical equipment.
Interestingly, when the investigation began, the defendants tried to kill the main witness in this case, who acted as an intermediary in receiving a bribe ...
So it is possible that in stories with explosions the same corruption trail can be hidden. It is possible that on the exploded arsenals they had been illegally selling ammunition there for a long time. And then, in order to somehow write off the sold “goods”, the interested parties arranged explosive “fireworks” that shook Bashkiria and Udmurtia.
I must say that this scheme of cheating sold ammunition is not new. About ten years ago, thieving generals from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, who provoked a number of suspicious explosions in military depots in the Dnipropetrovsk region, covered their traces in the same way. They say that the Ukrainian military wrote off these explosions weaponwhich then surfaced in one of the African countries.
Where ammunition can float from Russian warehouses, one can only guess. In any case, with those commercial morals that prevail in our Ministry of Defense, the story of the explosions may have the most unexpected continuation.
Information