


Russia has jailed a top defense official, the fourth in a month, expanding President Vladimir V. Putin’s biggest shake-up of his military leadership since the invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago.
A Moscow military court ordered Lt. Gen. Vadim Shamarin jailed for two months on Wednesday on suspicion of “large-scale” bribery, Russian law enforcement authorities said on Thursday. He faces 15 years in prison, state news agencies said. General Shamarin was a deputy head of the Russian military’s main commanding body, the general staff, and oversaw its communications directorate.
The detention of General Shamarin is the latest in a series of high-profile arrests that have coincided with Mr. Putin’s appointment of a new defense minister, Andrei R. Belousov, earlier this month.
Timur Ivanov, a deputy defense minister, and Lt. Gen. Yuri Kuznetsov, who oversaw the ministry’s personnel department, were detained for the same bribery charge in recent weeks. And earlier this week, state media reported that Maj. Gen. Ivan Popov, the former commander of Russia’s 58th Combined Arms Army, had been detained on fraud allegations.
The Kremlin tightly controls the justice system, and taken together, the corruption arrests signal Mr. Putin’s most aggressive effort to overhaul his military leadership since the disastrous beginnings of his Ukraine invasion in early 2022. On Thursday evening, Russian authorities announced yet another arrest: A military official overseeing procurement, Vladimir Verteletsky, had been detained for “abuse of official powers.”