Lieutenant-General Vadim Shamarin, deputy head of the Russian army’s General Staff, was for some reason arrested for bribery Thursday rather than thrown out a window or force-fed polonium borscht or on a helicopter that suddenly suffered mechanical problems, Reuters reports.
The crimes alleged against Shamarin are a pretty standard pay-for-play scheme with a radio equipment vendor that was worth about 36 million roubles ($400,000 American). Sham’s the fourth high-level Russian military brass to be cuffed over the last month following the arrests for Lieutenant-General Yuri Kuznetsov, head of personnel at the defence ministry, and Major-General Ivan Popov, former commander of the 58th army, and Deputy Defence Minister Timur Ivanov – all of them having found out the hard way that bribery is illegal if Vladimir Putin doesn’t like you.