The trial of former Minister of Economic Development Alexei Ulyukaev, who is accused of receiving a $2 million bribe, is nearing its end. The debate is over, the defendant will make his final statement, after which Judge Larisa Semenova will retire to make her decision. But it is already clear that Ulyukaev's case will become a precedent both from a legal and political point of view.

The trial will be remembered for the absence from the courtroom of a person who could have become the main prosecution witness – Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin. The judge summoned Sechin to court four times, but each time it turned out that Sechin would not be able to appear to testify and confront the defendant because he was very busy with work. The testimony he gave during the investigation was also not included in the case. Thus, Igor Sechin is not in the case – but the case is.

In his absence, the main prosecution witness was former head of Rosneft's security service Oleg Feoktistov. He gave his testimony behind closed doors, but from the words of the prosecutor and lawyers it is known that Feoktistov knows most of what he knows from Igor Sechin. The defense considers Feoktistov an interested party: if his words are not confirmed, then it turns out that he wrote a false denunciation and can be held accountable for it, which is what Ulyukaev demanded.

The trial will also be remembered for the record punishment requested by the state prosecution for an official accused of accepting a bribe – 10 years of imprisonment in a maximum security penal colony and a fine of 500 million rubles. The sad record for the severity of punishment for high-ranking bureaucrats currently belongs to former Tula Governor Vyacheslav Dudka, who was sentenced in July 2013 to nine and a half years in a maximum security penal colony – as requested by the prosecutor’s office. By coincidence, the state prosecution in Dudka’s case was represented, as in the Ulyukaev trial, by prosecutor Boris Neporozhny.

The trial will be remembered as an example of specific work with the evidence base. The prosecution assumes that the initiator of the meeting during which the bag was handed over was Ulyukaev, not Sechin: it was Ulyukaev who, seeing a missed call from Sechin on his phone, called the head of Rosneft back. From the transcript of their conversation it follows that Sechin was the one who sought the meeting, while Ulyukaev, on the contrary, tried to avoid it or reschedule it, but in vain.

The Ulyukaev trial is also an example of how easily the emphasis in the news agenda can shift. The bribe that Ulyukaev is accused of receiving is comparable to the damage caused to the treasury, according to the investigation, by former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov (56 million rubles, or $1.7 million at the exchange rate on November 28, 2013), who ordered a road to be built at the department’s expense to a holiday home owned by his son-in-law. But in Serdyukov’s case, the case was closed under amnesty after three months – although at first it also looked like a bid for a show trial of corrupt officials.

The Ulyukaev trial will also be remembered as confirmation of the special role of "special people" in the system of power. The refusal of the potential main prosecution witness to participate in the court hearings and the lack of a sharp reaction to this from the country's leadership confirmed that the court in Russia still cannot be considered an absolutely strong and empowered branch of power. The demand by the state prosecutor for a harsh punishment for Ulyukaev with not entirely convincing evidence of the minister's guilt shows that the original goal of the trial was not the fight against corruption, but a demonstration of the power of the special services, especially the FSB, their control over the economic block of the government, believes Ilya Shumanov, deputy director of Transparency International - Russia. A lenient sentence for Ulyukaev (not to mention an acquittal) will cause significant reputational damage to the security forces, so they insist on a harsh verdict, not paying much attention to the quality of the trial.

How the Ulyukaev trial will go down in history