President Vladimir Putin signed a package of decrees on reshuffles in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Andrei Novikov, appointed to this post in March 2005, was dismissed from the post of deputy minister. He was replaced by a former employee of the KGB and the external relations department of the St. Petersburg mayor's office, and since 2005, an auditor of the Accounts Chamber, Oleg Safonov. The head of the Department of Economic Security (DEB) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Sergei Meshcheryakov, was replaced in this post by Yevgeny Shkolov, a former employee of the security agencies, assistant to the head of the presidential administration in 2002-2005, and since March 2006, vice president of Transneft.

Meshcheryakov has been appointed to the equivalent position of head of the Department for Combating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DBOPiT) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. This department has been without a head for six months, which, according to a DBOPiT employee, has had a negative impact on the work of the once formidable service, the successor to the GUBOP. At the same time, Mikhail Vanichkin has been relieved of his post as head of the Main Directorate of Internal Affairs for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region and has become an assistant to the Minister of Internal Affairs. A source in the central office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs interprets this as a demotion. Vanichkin has been replaced in St. Petersburg by his deputy Vladislav Piotrovsky. “For the first time during personnel changes in the Main Directorate of Internal Affairs, one professional detective has been replaced by another professional detective who has solved many high-profile contract killings,” says an employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs familiar with the situation. According to lawyer Yuri Schmidt, Piotrovsky has long been a candidate for the post of head of the Main Directorate of Internal Affairs. “He is a well-known person, at the center of all criminal events in St. Petersburg, and has long outgrown the position he occupies,” Schmidt noted.

Thus, of all the transferred police officials, only Andrei Novikov, who supervised the criminal police unit in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, has not yet received a new appointment. A source in the Ministry of Internal Affairs says that yesterday there were rumors in the ministry about Novikov being appointed as the presidential envoy to the Northwestern Federal District instead of Ilya Klebanov. However, a source in the Kremlin did not confirm the version about Klebanov's resignation.

The changes in the Ministry of Internal Affairs are not connected with political distrust of the transferred police officers, believes State Duma deputy Alexander Khinshtein, since all of them, except for Andrei Novikov, received at least equivalent positions, and Novikov himself was dismissed with the wording “in connection with the transfer to another job.” The appointment of Shkolov, who is close to presidential aide Viktor Ivanov, as head of the DEB – the key police unit for combating economic crime and corruption – hardly means that we should expect an intensification of the fight on this front. It is impossible to “strengthen or weaken something that does not exist,” says Khinshtein, stipulating that he does not doubt the professionalism of the transferred officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The reshuffle of personnel of St. Petersburg origin in the security agencies is the prerogative of the president personally, reminds political scientist Alexei Makarkin; Putin has done this in the Ministry of Internal Affairs more than once.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs has been shaken up