The reported suicide of Russia’s transport minister hours after he was dismissed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and amid speculation he would be arrested on corruption charges, has shocked the country’s elite.
Several hundred mourners, including ministers and state officials, streamed past the open coffin of former Russian minister of transport Roman Starovoyt on Thursday.
He was found dead in his car on Monday, hours after being fired by Putin, with Russian investigators saying he shot himself.
Photo: Government Pool Photo via AP
There was a palpable unease as mourners clutched bouquets of red roses at his farewell.
Russian media reported Starovoyt was being investigated for corruption and could have been arrested within days.
Many who came to the ceremony refused to speak to reporters.
“It’s a great loss, very unexpected,” said Valentina, a 42-year-old translator whose husband worked with Starovoyt. “He was very active, cheerful and loved life very much. I don’t know how it happened.”
Starovoyt had been governor of Russia’s western Kursk region for five years before being promoted to Moscow, just a few months before Ukrainian troops captured dozens of border settlements in a shock cross-border incursion.
His successor was arrested this spring for embezzling funds intended to beef up the fortifications that Ukraine ended up slicing through with ease — an embarrassing setback for Russia’s military.
“They tried to make him the scapegoat, as the incursion mainly happened, because there weren’t enough soldiers to protect the border, but it’s easier to put the blame on a civilian official,” political commentator Andrey Pertsev said.
The case is one part of a wider crackdown on officials alleged to have enriched themselves at the expense of the Russian army amid the Ukraine offensive — a Kremlin campaign that has ripped up previous norms about what is acceptable for Russian officials.
“There used to be rules, where people knew that once you climbed up high enough, they wouldn’t mess with you,” Pertsev said. “You had guarantees, and everyone understood the rules... but they do not work any more.”
In a sign of how out-of-favor Starovoyt had become, Putin has not publicly commented on his death.
Asked if he would attend the memorial ceremony in Moscow, Putin’s spokesman told reporters: “The president has a different work schedule today.”
While Putin has criticized and vowed to stamp out corruption throughout his 25 years in power, his rule has been characterized by systemic graft, critics said.
The smattering of high-profile arrests has more typically been used to target opponents, or come about as the result of infighting among those lower down Russia’s chain of power.
However, the offensive on Ukraine has changed that.
“Something within the system has started to work completely differently,” analyst Tatiana Stanovaya wrote for Carnegie Politika, an online outlet that publishes commentary on Russian and Eurasian politics.
“Any action or inaction that, in the eyes of the authorities, increases the state’s vulnerability to hostile actions by the enemy must be punished mercilessly and uncompromisingly,” Stanovaya said.
In such a climate, it was inevitable that heads would have to roll over the Kursk failings.
Nina Khrushcheva, a professor at The New School, a university in New York City, said Starovoyt’s apparent suicide showed the Russian elite was “scared.”
The current climate is such that “it is impossible to leave the top brass,” Khrushcheva said.
“This is something we have not really seen since 1953,” she added, referring to the execution of a close ally by Joseph Stalin.
To the Kremlin, the Ukraine campaign is a “holy war” that has rewritten the rules of loyalty and service, she said.
“During a holy war, you don’t steal... you tighten your belts and work 24 hours a day to make the weapons you need,” she added.
That atmosphere has created a “sense of hopelessness” among officials in Moscow that is unlikely to fade, Stanovaya said.
“Going forward, the system will be ready to sacrifice increasingly prominent figures,” she warned.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS