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The head of the engineering troops of the Far Eastern Military District is suspected of bribery
Another major scandal broke out in the Far Eastern Military District. A criminal case under part one of Article 285 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (abuse of official powers) was initiated against the head of the engineering troops of the Far Eastern Military District, Ilya Cherechukin. Over the past three months, the major general has become the third senior officer in the Far Eastern Military District to be investigated.According to Assistant District Military Prosecutor Svetlana Ustinova, the criminal case against General Cherechukin “was initiated due to the fact that he received a large sum of money in his office.” The court has already chosen a preventive measure in the form of a recognizance not to leave. Officially, Ilya Cherechukin is on vacation and refuses to comment.
On February 8, in Ilya Cherechukin’s office, employees of the Organized Crime Control Department of the Khabarovsk Territory Internal Affairs Directorate, the Far Eastern District Prosecutor’s Office and military counterintelligence officers discovered a folder containing 400 thousand rubles. bills marked with a special composition. The head of the district's engineering troops himself then explained the origin of this money by saying that it was planted by one of his subordinates. As Ilya Cherechukin told investigators, literally 15 minutes before the appearance of the task force, Nikolai Eliseev, the commander of the engineering base, came into his office. According to the major general, Colonel Eliseev has a personal dislike for him as his immediate superior, since the personnel department of the district is considering his dismissal from the ranks of the armed forces. Mr. Cherechukin characterizes his subordinate as a drunkard and an unrestrained person.
Colonel Eliseev himself stated that the general demanded more than half a million rubles from him as a bribe for withdrawing his resignation letter. To obtain this amount, the major general demanded that the commander of the engineering base illegally sell the DT-94 tractor, which was on the unit’s balance sheet.
As one of Eliseev’s recent colleagues, former commander of the pontoon-bridge regiment Valery Prikaznov, told Vremya Novostey, a similar system of extortion in the engineering troops of the Far Eastern Military District has existed since General Cherechukin arrived in the Far East from Moscow in 2004. The chief obliged the heads of all eight divisions subordinate to the engineering department to donate cash for various needs. According to Colonel Prikaznov, “the standard donation amount was 30 thousand rubles, and it didn’t matter whether it was a trip to Moscow or the birthday of one of the generals.”
According to the former commander of the pontoon-bridge regiment, General Cherechukin was ready to turn a blind eye to the misdeeds of his subordinates for a certain bribe - from a thousand dollars to a million rubles. These amounts were collected either from personnel or military property was sold. Last summer, Colonel Eliseev refused to finance another initiative of the chief of engineering troops and publicly called him “a bribe-taker and a thief.” After which, as retired Colonel Prikaznov assures, Eliseev was forcibly sent to the 11th department of the 301st military hospital (psychiatry).
Prikaznov himself was dismissed from his position on December 19 last year with the wording “violation of the terms of the contract.” According to him, Major General Cherechukin accused him of inability to perform the duties of a commander. The conflict between the officers began to flare up in August last year after Prikaznov was unable to raise the required amount for a gift to the then commander of the Far Eastern Military District, Yuri Yakubov.
The current commander of the Far Eastern Military District, Vladimir Bulgakov, has so far refrained from commenting on the case of General Cherechukin. The district leadership has not yet spoken out regarding previous corruption scandals within the Far Eastern generals. The military commissar of the Khabarovsk Territory, Evgeny Feoktistov, was accused in December last year of abuse of official powers and misappropriation of someone else's property. And in January, Oleg Raikhman, deputy commander of the Far Eastern Military District for armaments, was detained. The prosecutor's office charged the lieutenant general with abuse of power causing grave consequences.