Russian army commander arrested for ‘selling tank engines’

A Russian army officer has been arrested for allegedly stealing the engines out of T-90 battle tanks.

The Kommersant newspaper reported that Colonel Alexander Denisov is accused of stealing seven V-92S2 engines worth 20.5 million roubles (around £200,000) between November 2021 and April 2022.

Col Denisov, who is in charge of technical support for tanks in the Southern Military District, was arrested last month near Rostov in southern Russia and was charged with “stealing parts intended to be installed on tanks”.

Corruption plagues Russia, especially in its military, and has been blamed for hindering the Russian army since it launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Russian soldiers have been sent into battle with rusty weapons and broken radios. Tanks have regularly run out of fuel and broken down.

Western analysts have estimated that Russia has lost nearly 2,000 tanks in the 14 months of the war and the Foreign Office has said that the Russian army has had to use previously mothballed T-62 tanks, produced before 1975, as battlefield replacements.

Since they entered service in the early 1990s, T-90 tanks have become the backbone of Russia’s armoured divisions. They were designed in the Soviet Union to be simple, light and fast and are now mainly powered by the 12-cylinder V-92S2 engine which is produced at the Chelyabinsk tractor factory, close to the Ural Mountains.

Each engine weighs roughly one tonne and can generate 1,000 horsepower. When it was introduced in 2000, the V-92S2 engine was considered the best and most powerful tank engine in the Russian army.

Prosecutors at the Rostov military garrison court in southern Russia said that Col Denisov had sold the engines on the black market. In 2019, two other Russian army officers were convicted of a similar theft.

Col Denisov has pleaded not guilty.