The former head of the communications department of the Russian Ministry of Defense has been sentenced to nine years in a penal colony on charges of bribery. For this serviceman, this is already the second such sentence.

The 235th Garrison Military Court has sentenced Alexander Ogloblin, former head of the Russian Defense Ministry's Communications Directorate, to nine years in a strict-regime penal colony for accepting an especially large bribe (Part 6, Article 290 of the Russian Criminal Code). This information was reported by RBC. Additionally, the court ordered the military official to pay a fine of 12 million rubles and stripped him of his rank of Major General. The state prosecution had previously sought a 12.5-year prison sentence and a fine of 60 million rubles for Ogloblin. The court hearings in this case were held behind closed doors. The defendant's lawyer, Maxim Dovgan, told RBC that his client had repeatedly—more than ten times—attempted during the investigation to sign a contract with the Russian Defense Ministry and go to war with Ukraine, but was denied each time. According to the investigation materials, between 2016 and 2021, Ogloblin received a bribe of 12 million rubles from the Perm-based telephone plant "Telta." In return, the Major General promised to support the enterprise in fulfilling a state defense order for the supply of communication devices to the Defense Ministry, totaling over 1.2 billion rubles. Ogloblin was detained and arrested in October 2024. In March of the same year, he was released from a penal colony where he had been serving a 4.5-year sentence for fraud (Part 4, Article 159 of the Russian Criminal Code). The unserved part of his sentence was replaced with corrective labor after he provided testimony in the case of former Head of the Main Communications Directorate of the Armed Forces Vadim Shamarin. This was reported to RIA Novosti by Shamarin's lawyer, Igor Dyukin. The verdict in the fraud case against Ogloblin was delivered in February 2022. In the Shamarin case, the Major General appeared as a witness. As Kommersant reported, the military official and his brother, businessman Alexei, acted as intermediaries in the transfer of a bribe to Shamarin. Shamarin was placed in a pre-trial detention center at the end of May. According to the investigation, from April 2016 to October 2023, he received 36 million rubles from the "Telta" plant for "increasing the volume of supplies under state contracts" and "general patronage."