By Enyichukwu Enemanna
A Russian court on Monday jailed a former governor of the Kursk border region, where Ukraine’s army broke through in 2024, for 14 years over kickbacks received from government contracts related to the construction of fortifications.
Alexei Smirnov, was also given a fine of 400 million rubles ($5 million),” a Kursk court said in a statement following a trial on charges of bribe-taking.
In August 2024, Ukrainian troops stormed into the western region and held swathes of land for months, the first military incursion into Russia territory by a foreign army in decades.
Since then, Moscow has launched a sweeping corruption crackdown targeting top regional as well as military officials over the failure to stop the incursion, which came two-and-a-half years into Russia’s full-scale offensive on Ukraine.
Smirnov was charged with receiving the equivalent of over $250,000 in kickback payments, along with two associates, for giving preferential treatment in assigning government fortifications contracts worth around $2.5 million in total.
According to the court, he pleaded guilty.
Another former Kursk governor, Roman Starovoyt, who led the region for five years until a few months before the Ukrainian breakthrough committed suicide last year after being dismissed from his post as transport minister amid speculation he was also set to be arrested on corruption charges.
The Russian army never pushed Ukrainians out of Kursk until April 2025 but with the help of thousands of North Korean troops.
