Translated material
"Lefortovo" call
The Investigative Committee at the Prosecutor's Office was reinforced with a security officer from prison
Vladimir Putin, as his press service reported yesterday, signed a decree appointing another deputy chairman of the Investigative Committee at the Prosecutor's Office (SKP) of Russia. 49-year-old Colonel Alexander Sorochkin became the second appointed out of 12 deputy heads of the new structure, according to the staffing table. The positions of the remaining deputy heads of this department remain vacant.Mr. Sorochkin, according to the decree, will head the Military Investigation Department (MID) at the UPC, that is, he will manage the investigators who previously worked in the Main Military Prosecutor's Office (GVP) and its local divisions. This position is very influential - military investigators are involved in the investigation of all criminal cases where military personnel are at least somehow involved (the Ministry of Defense, the FSB, the Ministry of Emergency Situations, etc.), and before the reform of the Russian prosecutor's office system carried out last summer, the GVP regularly “issued” scandalous criminal charges affairs. However, who Alexander Sorochkin is and why exactly he was entrusted with such an important area of work as the investigation of “war crimes” remained a complete mystery yesterday.
As it turned out, Vladimir Putin signed the decree on his appointment to the UPC on December 1, and yesterday he already began performing his duties in a new capacity. However, neither in the UPC, nor in any other department was anyone able to give even a minimally brief biography of this person. By the decree on his appointment, Mr. Sorochkin was simultaneously relieved of his previously held position. But no one even officially named his last place of work. Accordingly, all information about the head of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was based only on unofficial data, and very scattered ones. In open sources, Alexander Sorochkin was mentioned only twice, and both times he was named as one of the leaders of the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center.
The first time Mr. Sorochkin was mentioned was in 2003, when he appeared in court as a defendant in a civil trial for failure to fulfill his official duties. The plaintiff in the case, human rights activist Yuri Shadrin, then accused the head of Lefortovo, Sorochkin, of refusing to give him certified power of attorney forms signed by his client, which is why Mr. Shadrin could not fulfill his duties as a defense attorney. The second time Mr. Sorochkin came to light was in 2005, when information appeared that a prisoner had allegedly escaped from Lefortovo. Then the colonel officially denied these rumors in the media.
From unofficial sources it became known that at one time Mr. Sorochkin graduated from the Red Banner Institute of the KGB of the USSR (now the SVR Intelligence School, where Vladimir Putin himself studied). Already in the 90s, one of the Internet sites of the Chechen separatists mentioned a certain “FSB Colonel Sorochkin,” accusing him of “complicity in the murder of Dzhokhar Dudayev,” and in 2003, “Colonel Sorochkin” was mentioned in an interview by someone who was killed a year ago in London fugitive FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko. It is noteworthy that, according to unofficial information, Alexander Sorochkin worked, like Litvinenko, in the scandalous department for the development of criminal organizations (URPO) of the FSB, several employees of which publicly accused the leadership of preparing the murder of Boris Berezovsky. After the disbandment of URPO in 2003, according to unofficial information, Mr. Sorochkin was transferred to Lefortovo. At first he held the post of deputy chief and acting. head of the pre-trial detention center, in 2005 he was temporarily seconded to the Federal Migration Service (FMS) as the head of the organizational-zonal department, and at the beginning of this year, as far as is known, he again headed Lefortovo (officially he became an employee of the Ministry of Justice).
If these data are correct, then the reluctance to advertise Mr. Sorochkin’s biography is quite understandable. The appointment of the former head of the pre-trial detention center to the position of chief military investigator looks like an extraordinary decision.
According to the decree on the creation of the SKP (it began to operate in September of this year in accordance with the amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code and the Law “On the Prosecutor’s Office” adopted a little earlier), the head of this department, Alexander Bastrykin, should have 12 deputies. However, over the past period, Mr. Sorochkin has become only the second deputy appointed. According to unofficial information, this is explained purely by financial problems.
Although the SKP is formally called “under the prosecutor’s office,” it actually has no relation to it and is completely independent, including in administrative terms. According to the presidential decree, starting next year the Investigative Committee will be financed not through the prosecutor’s office, but directly from the federal budget. Among other things, the government of the Russian Federation was instructed “by January 1, 2008, to make a decision on vesting the Investigative Committee with the powers of the main manager of federal budget funds.”
But since until the new year the UPC is still financed by the prosecutor’s office itself, the leadership of the latter, according to unofficial information and media reports, simply did not allocate sufficient funds to the UPC to fully support the new department. Accordingly, the UPC allegedly simply does not have the money yet to finance all the new vacancies. And the head of the department, obviously, has to “fill” only the most necessary positions for now. So far, only one deputy to Mr. Bastrykin has been appointed - Yuri Nyrkov, who, according to unofficial information, oversees the work of the UPC personnel service. Now it’s the turn of the Armed Forces of Ukraine - establishing work on the investigation of “war crimes”, of course, is one of the main priorities of the prosecutor’s investigation.
It is worth noting that information previously appeared in the media that the UPC, due to problems with financing, had problems with placement. The UPC does not yet have its own money to buy, construct or rent buildings or premises, and the prosecutor’s office is very reluctant to share its space with the new department.