The message was sent by a Russian officer to a subordinate who was about to take over his command in Ukraine. It was obtained by investigative journalists at Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL.
“War is war, but don’t forget about the cash. Get yours.”
Then: “Delete this message later.”
He did not delete it. The message, along with thousands of others, was eventually leaked and verified by forensics laboratories in the United States and data researchers in Germany. It came from Major General Roman Demurchiev, a man Putin had personally promoted to general in June 2023. His text messages document not only corruption on a significant scale, but also evidence of war crimes committed by his forces in Ukraine.
He is not unusual. He is typical.
The Price List
Russia has been fighting in Ukraine for more than four years. During that time, a parallel economy has developed inside the Russian military – one in which survival is not determined by valor or luck, but by how much a soldier can pay his commander. The tariffs are documented in leaked messages, complaints filed with Russian government websites, videos circulating on Russian social media, and testimony gathered by independent researchers. They vary by unit and region, but the structure is consistent.
$2,000 – assignment to a drone operator position, away from the infantry front line.
$6,000 – service in the rear, far from active combat.
$12,000 – a forged medical discharge, allowing a soldier to leave the front entirely.
These are not rumors. They are prices that soldiers have reported paying, in transactions that their commanders treat as routine. Alexandra Arkhipova, a Russian researcher at the Wilson Center who spent weeks analyzing nearly 12,000 complaints filed with a Russian government website over six months, described what she found: soldiers and their families writing that they “paid everything to have our father, brother, husband not to be killed.”
“In many cases, superiors use tortures to take money from the soldiers,” she told PBS News.
Soldiers report handing over up to 80% of their salary just to stay alive. Those who refuse to pay are assigned to suicidal frontal assaults. In one documented case, a soldier named Denis Kolesnikov filmed himself explaining the system: those who couldn’t pay their commanders were “reset” – sent to die. He had paid approximately $30,000 to be transferred from his unit. His current whereabouts are unknown.
The Institute for the Study of War has documented cases of Russian military commanders committing their men to suicidal assaults if they refused to pay bribes, or if they attempted to complain about corruption. The practice has been confirmed by multiple independent sources across multiple theaters of the war.
The Stolen Armor
The corruption does not stop at bribery. It extends to the equipment soldiers carry into battle.
Ukrainian troops examining destroyed Russian T-80 tanks discovered that the explosive reactive armor – the boxes mounted on the exterior designed to deflect anti-tank weapons – had been hollowed out. The layers of metal, rubber, and explosive compounds that were supposed to be there had been replaced with nothing, or with inferior materials. The explosives, which have significant black market value, had been stolen somewhere in the supply chain. The soldiers sitting inside those tanks had no idea their armor was fraudulent.
In 2025, a video circulated on Russian social media showing military police in the Siberian region of Tuva beating and electrocuting wounded soldiers to force them back to the front. The soldiers were wounded. They were being tortured to return to combat.
Weapons are stolen from front-line units and sold. Soldiers report being made to purchase their own equipment – drones, electronics, other supplies – at personal expense when official resupply fails to arrive. The UK Ministry of Defence’s intelligence assessment flagged “corruption amongst commanders” as a factor “almost certainly contributing to the continued fragile morale of much of the force.”
Russia’s military has been fighting this war, in part, with armor that was hollowed out to fund someone’s dacha, and with soldiers who spent their savings on the right to not be deliberately killed by their own officers.
The Men at the Top: Four Deputy Ministers, One Criminal System
On March 5, 2026, Russian investigators arrested Ruslan Tsalikov – the man who had been first deputy defense minister for nearly a decade, and Sergei Shoigu’s closest associate for three decades of shared government posts. The charges: organizing a criminal group that embezzled state funds between 2017 and 2024. Money laundering. Bribery. Twelve counts of embezzlement. Two counts of receiving bribes. The criminal group he allegedly led stole more than 6.6 billion rubles – approximately $81 million – primarily through inflated procurement contracts for military clothing via JSC Voentorg, a defense supply company.
The specifics are telling. Not weapons procurement. Not ammunition. Clothing. The men at the top of Russia’s wartime defense ministry were stealing from the budget for soldiers’ uniforms.
Among the bribes Tsalikov accepted, according to investigators: a Honda Gold Wing motorcycle worth 2.3 million rubles, registered in his son’s name.
Tsalikov is the fourth former deputy defense minister to face criminal prosecution since Shoigu was removed in May 2024. Before him:
Timur Ivanov - sentenced to 13 years in prison in July 2025 for embezzlement and money laundering. Now awaiting a separate trial for accepting bribes totaling 1.3 billion rubles – approximately $16 million. He petitioned to be deployed to the front in Ukraine as a form of “atonement.” A Moscow court rejected the request, noting that frontline service is “a privilege, not an indulgence.”
Pavel Popov - arrested on corruption charges in 2024.
Vladimir Kuznetsov - arrested on corruption charges in 2024.
Dmitry Bulgakov - arrested on corruption charges, logistics side of the ministry.
Five senior officials from the same ministry. The same charges – procurement fraud, embezzlement, bribery – repeated across the entire logistics and supply apparatus of the Russian military.
The pattern is not coincidental. CEPA’s analysis found that roughly 85% of defendants in the defense ministry purge come from the logistics side of the military machine – construction, food supply, and ammunition. The armament side has barely been touched. This asymmetry is likely deliberate: the Kremlin wants to squeeze costs in logistics and support, so that spending on weapons can keep growing, while the corruption in weapons procurement itself remains politically sensitive to expose.
Shoigu: Still Standing, Slowly Being Dismantled
The man who presided over this system for a decade is Sergei Shoigu. He was defense minister from 2012 to 2024. He was removed by Putin in May 2024 and transferred to the position of Security Council secretary – a formal role that preserves his dignity while stripping him of the budget he controlled.
Shoigu has not been charged. He has not been arrested. He continues to appear at official functions.
But the systematic prosecution of everyone around him tells a coherent story. Tsalikov followed Shoigu for thirty years across five different government posts. Their careers were inseparable. The criminal organization Tsalikov is accused of leading operated between 2017 and 2024 – the entirety of a period in which Shoigu controlled the defense ministry. When investigators traced the procurement fraud to its source, they found a contractor named Andrei Yesipov, former CEO of a company called Piket, which had defense contracts worth more than 6 billion rubles for body armor and helmets. He was sentenced to nine years in November 2025. His testimony then pointed upward to Tsalikov.
Investigators are working the corruption chain from the bottom up. Each arrest produces testimony that implicates the next person up the hierarchy. The Jamestown Foundation’s assessment is pointed: “Putin keeps Shoigu in formal positions, but his clan and bureaucratic influence are being systematically dismantled. This is a convenient arrangement for the Kremlin: the former minister remains manageable while being stripped of real power and resources.” Criminal cases as a tool of political power. Corruption prosecuted not to clean up the system, but to clear out one faction and replace it with another.
The Systemic Question
The CEPA analyst Mikhail Komin asked the right question in his March 2026 analysis: “The central question is whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will change the system or just replace the beneficiaries of corruption.” The answer, based on everything documented, is the second. The new Defense Minister, Andrei Belousov, is an economist with no military background. His appointment was explicitly described by the Kremlin as an effort to impose financial discipline on a ministry that was consuming extraordinary resources without adequate accountability. CEPA’s analysis notes that Belousov has almost certainly built new rent-extraction chains of his own – the defense budget is too large, the oversight too limited, and the incentive structures too embedded for corruption to simply stop because a new minister arrived.
Russia’s Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index ranking for 2025: 157th out of 182 countries. Score: 22 out of 100. Its worst result in the history of the index.
What changed with the purge is who gets to steal, not whether stealing happens. Shoigu’s network is being dismantled. Belousov’s network is being constructed. The soldiers at the front are still paying their commanders for the right to not be sent on suicide missions. The body armor may still be hollow.
What This Means for the War
The corruption documented here has direct military consequences. CEPA’s analysis found that as rumors of corruption and unpaid benefits reach the Russian provinces, willingness to volunteer is declining. The financial incentive that drove recruitment in 2022 and 2023 – substantial signing bonuses and salaries well above civilian wages – is being eroded by the reality that much of that money is extracted by commanders before it reaches the soldiers.
The “last train effect,” in which men signed up for short-term financial gain hoping they would not actually have to fight, is, as the Kremlin-friendly Telegram channel Nezygar noted, “almost exhausted.” The pipeline of volunteers that sustained Russian offensive operations is narrowing as the reality of what awaits them at the front becomes better understood.
Russia has disciplined more than 30,000 soldiers for corruption in a single year. That figure, released officially, represents a system so saturated with corruption that even the regime’s own statistics confirm it – while simultaneously suggesting that the vast majority of corrupt acts go undisciplined.
The men sitting in the Kremlin and the men sitting in the trenches are participating in the same war. But they are having very different financial experiences of it. One group is building criminal networks, taking motorcycles as bribes, and embezzling millions from clothing contracts. The other is paying $2,000 for the right to operate a drone instead of walking into machine gun fire.
The officer told his successor to get his. To not forget about the cash.
He deleted the message. The message survived anyway.
Sources:
RFE/RL Schemes investigative unit (General Demurchiev correspondence), PBS News Hour, CEPA, Meduza, The Moscow Times, Reuters, Jamestown Foundation, LBC, ISW, Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index 2025, Wilson Center (Alexandra Arkhipova research)