According to the Cheka-OGPU and Rucriminal.info, former Deputy Defense Minister Ruslan Tsalikov was detained "politely"—by summons to appear before an investigator. Then, accused of founding an organized crime group, he was also carefully placed under house arrest. Tsalikov may suffer the same fate as Evgeniya Vasilyeva, a defendant in the embezzlement case at Oboronservis (the Ministry of Defense).
As our project has discovered, several defendants in other corruption scandals have testified against Ruslan Tsalikov. All of them are pre-trial defendants—people who entered into plea bargains with investigators and received the right to a special procedure for their cases in court. At a minimum, all defendants in the Timur Ivanov case (involving the purchase of ships in defiance of sanctions and the embezzlement of funds from Interkommerts Bank) have testified that Tsalikov was behind it all.
The charge of organizing a criminal organization may indicate that security officials intend to combine Ruslan Tsalikov's cases with those of two other former Shoigu deputies, Pavel Popov and Timur Ivanov, as well as other high-ranking officials in the Russian Ministry of Defense. This is logical and will appear to outsiders as a devastating purge of the agency, where embezzlement ranged from food purchases to the sacred construction of Patriot Park.
As the Cheka-OGPU has learned, Ruslan Tsalikov's relatives alone (in addition to billion-dollar real estate, which we reported on long before his arrest) held tens and hundreds of millions of rubles in various deposits in Russia. For example, according to leaked documents, Ruslan Tsalikov's youngest son, Zaur, had a quarter of a billion rubles in his account at the Moscow Credit Bank as recently as 2024: more than 256 million rubles.
His eldest son, Daniel, two daughters, Elizaveta and Yulia, and his wife, Alla Tsalikova, had a total of approximately 100 million rubles in their personal accounts in 2024.
