The director of the Patriot military park was detained in connection with a bribe case.

The director of the Patriot military park was detained in connection with a bribery case. One of his predecessors was convicted of fraud

Author, News Department

Place of work, BBC Russian Service

Published 2 minutes ago

Reading time: 3 min

The general director of the Patriot theme park near Moscow of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Igor Vasiliev, was detained in Moscow on suspicion of receiving a particularly large bribe, TASS reported late on Monday, October 5, citing a source in law enforcement agencies.

Earlier, the St. Petersburg publication Fontanka reported about Vasilev’s arrest. According to him, we are talking about a bribe in the amount of 80 million rubles.

In early October, two of Vasiliev’s deputies, Sergei Fedosov and Alexey Pavlyukov, were also detained in cases of bribery and fraud, Fontanka recalls. According to her source close to the investigation, the reason for the cases was their receipt of about 100 million rubles from businessmen - in return, Patriot representatives helped businessmen receive fictitious contracts. Another deputy director of Patriot, Vitaly Melimuk, was detained on suspicion of taking a bribe in April 2026, shortly after Vasiliev was appointed head of the park.

The Ministry of Defense did not report the detention of Vasilyev, but in response to a request from RBC, the department stated that it was “working closely with military investigative authorities and providing maximum assistance in the investigation of the criminal case.” According to the publication, the investigation is being conducted by the Main Military Investigation Department of the Investigative Committee of Russia. It will petition to take Vasiliev into custody; the trial to select a preventive measure for him will take place on Tuesday, October 6, RBC learned.

Vasiliev took charge of the Patriot Park, which is located in Kubinka near Moscow, just six months ago, and before that he spent many years in the civil service.

He is a native of Leningrad, a graduate of the Academy of Foreign Intelligence, in the mid-1980s he worked in the KGB Directorate for Leningrad and the Leningrad Region, and then in the First Main Directorate of the KGB of the USSR (foreign intelligence service). There he met the future President of Russia Vladimir Putin, Vasiliev said in 2004 in an interview with the newspaper Zyryanskaya Zhizn, describing their acquaintance as “not one-sided.” Then Vasiliev was unexpectedly appointed senator from the Komi Republic, with which he had little to do. He was considered as one of the candidates for the post of head of Komi, but in the end he was never appointed.

In 2010, the then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev proposed Vasiliev’s candidacy for the post of auditor of the Accounts Chamber, where he worked until 2014, after which he became the head of Rosreestr. One of the leaders of this department became involved in a criminal case after the publication of a report on corruption, which Vasiliev prepared as an auditor.

Two years later, Vasiliev became first acting and then governor of the Kirov region - after his predecessor Nikita Belykh was arrested and then convicted in a bribery case.

Vasiliev headed the Kirov region for five years, and then became deputy head of Rosstat, from where he resigned of his own free will in 2025 - this was his last civil service position before his appointment as general director of the Patriot park.

Vasiliev is already the second head of Patriot to become a defendant in a criminal case. One of his predecessors, Vyacheslav Akhmedov, was sentenced to five years in prison in 2025 in a case of large-scale fraud and forgery.

Akhmedov’s arrest in the summer of 2024 occurred against the backdrop of a wave of corruption cases against high-ranking representatives of the Russian Ministry of Defense, which was launched by the change of the head of the department in 2024, when Andrei Belousov became minister instead of Sergei Shoigu.

According to investigators, Akhmedov was involved in the fact that the money intended for Patriot was used for the construction and renovation of the country house of former Deputy Defense Minister Pavel Popov, who oversaw the park at the ministry.

In 2026, Popov was sentenced to 19 years in a maximum security colony; the term was later reduced to 10 years.

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