You hardly even know what to write about this police colonel, Zakharchenko, who has now also been found to have €300 million in a Swiss bank account.
The guy was one of the key *siloviki* (security-service and law-enforcement officials) responsible for fighting corruption, and at the same time he possessed one of the largest fortunes in Russia. And the most liquid kind, too—not stocks or businesses, but straight cash. 30 billion rubles.
Volkov is right when he says that the sum is almost impossible to comprehend. You can only measure it in terms of the budgets of major cities.
Zakharchenko’s boss—anti-corruption chief General Kurnosenko—is, as I understand it, on the run abroad. They say he is “on vacation overseas” and submitted his resignation request from there. How delightful.
There was so much talk about their foreign passports having been confiscated, but looking at these billions stuffed into boxes, I have no doubt that passports from various countries are lying in similar boxes too.
It’s very funny now to google his surname and read the very recent articles in pro-Putin rags about what a glorious anti-corruption campaign is about to begin in the Ministry of Internal Affairs:
When someone occasionally says, the entire police force should literally be disbanded and rebuilt from scratch, and it would still be much better, people usually argue back: “but there are professionals there too,” and all the rest of it.
But looking at the €300 million in the accounts of a cop from the department supposedly fighting corruption, it increasingly seems simpler just to disband the whole thing. It can’t get any worse.
Well, unless they find severed human heads in the home of the colonel in charge of catching serial killers.
And would that surprise you? It wouldn’t surprise me.
Of course, the entire leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs should be removed from office. There should be a massive case brought against them, and the generals fired and imprisoned should number in the dozens. What is needed is a major, genuine reform of the Ministry of Internal Affairs—one that would shake the very foundations of an institution left untouched since the 1970s.
Will that happen? Peskov said on Putin’s behalf that it will not.
You know why yourselves. Billions belonging to Peskov are sitting in the same kind of apartments and the same kind of Swiss bank accounts; billions belonging to Putin are sitting there too.
You can’t fire a minister because a 30-billion-ruble slush fund was set up inside his ministry. All you can do is send a signal: you’re managing the money the wrong way, Minister Kolokoltsev. It needs to be distributed differently.
Russia needs a revolution. Because in the Beautiful Russia of the Future, there will be no ministerial slush funds—and that, of course, would be a revolutionary change.