Security forces at the Ministry of Transport are making arrests and seizing documents one after another. Today, the head of a department was arrested, the heads of the Federal State Budgetary Institution "Agency for Automobile Transport" are under attack, and an investigation is underway into embezzlement in joint projects between the Ministry of Transport and JSC GLONASS. Transport Minister Nikitin is facing extreme turbulence.
The Basmanny District Court of Moscow has arrested Alexander Vasilchenko, Director of the Department of State Policy for Automobile and Urban Passenger Transport at the Ministry of Transport. The official is accused of accepting a bribe on an especially large scale. According to investigators, the incident dates back to 2021-2022, when Vasilchenko served as First Deputy Chairman of the Committee for Transport and Highways, and later as First Deputy Minister of Transport and Highways of the Kursk Region. Vasilchenko joined the Ministry of Transport alongside former Kursk Region Governor Roman Starovoit, who later committed suicide.
A source for the Cheka-OGPU and Rucriminal.info believes that the old Kursk cases are merely a pretext for the FSB's Transport Directorate to imprison a highly knowledgeable top Transport Ministry executive. And this may not be Vasilchenko's only case. A week before his arrest, three employees of the Federal State Budgetary Institution "Agency for Automobile Transport" were detained on bribery charges. The agency's general director, Moshin, and his deputies are Vasilchenko's direct protégés. A criminal scheme involving the sale of interregional bus routes had long been operating within the Agency, coordinated by Nedvizhai, the curator of Moscow bus stations. He, through close associates of the Federal Security Service (FSB) for Moscow and the Moscow Region, orchestrated the fabrication of deliberately false official documents regarding carriers, which enabled them to confiscate routes and resell them to affiliated entities. Nedvizhai received illegal remuneration through his subordinate, Zhuravlev.
Systemic abuses at JSC GLONASS were also recently uncovered. A financial analysis of JSC GLONASS's reports indicates that its CEO, Raikevich, siphoned off public funds through subsidiaries with private co-founders. Technological solutions developed within the ERA-GLONASS GIS have proven ineffective, while the costs of their creation were greatly inflated. Investigators are classifying these actions as embezzlement.
Another scandal involves the Ministry of Transport's personnel policy. The ministry's leadership is currently lobbying for the candidacy of Andrei Zhukov, who was previously barred from leading Rostransnadzor due to corruption risks, to become president of the Russian Automobile Transport Union.
All these events are a serious blow to Transport Minister Andrei Nikitin, and it's still unclear which individuals will be investigated. Therefore, preparations for their "evacuation" have already begun. According to a source, the Ministry of Transport's leadership informed Moshin that after the conclusion of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, negotiations will be held with representatives of the unmanned forces regarding the possibility of concluding a contract with the Ministry of Defense. This is an attempt to place Moshin specifically in the unmanned forces—sending him to the SVO under the guise of fulfilling a "defense contract"—to ensure his formal status as a combat veteran in the event of legal action by law enforcement agencies.
