Crime among Russia's officers soars to 10-yr high

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Crime among officers in Russia's armed forces soared to a 10-year high in the first half of 2009, the chief military prosecutor said on Thursday, threatening Kremlin attempts to galvanize the country's defence capability.

Russia has begun a radical reform of its military in a bid to combat low morale and create a smaller but better equipped and better paid combat-ready force.

The Kremlin-backed changes -- the most radical since the end of World War Two -- aim to more than halve the bloated numbers of officers, now a third of all servicemen.

"The scale of crime among officers has risen beyond all reasonable limits," Chief Military Prosecutor Sergei Fridinsky told a televised meeting with military prosecutors, noting that both junior and senior ranks were involved in the corruption.

Major problems include increasing embezzlement of military property, theft of funds earmarked for procurement of weapons and fraud in the allocation of housing for officers.

"The theft of hundreds of millions of roubles of budget funds ... in the final account thwarts strengthening the state's defence capability and combat-readiness of the armed forces," Fridinsky said.

Army and navy officers have committed more than 2,000 crimes so far this year, or more than a quarter of all crimes registered in the armed forces, he said.

Criminal cases have been launched against one general and 286 officers, more than 540 servicemen have suffered as a result of criminal offences committed by officers, including 16 who died, he said, without giving details.

Prosecutors registered around 1,500 of assault and battery of soldiers by officers in the same period, Fridinsky said.

Army enlistment offices are among most corrupt, with military commissars often colluding with draft dodgers seeking to bribe their way out of military service as unfit.

The chief doctor and an assistant in one military enlistment office in the Siberian city of Novokuznetsk issued false medical certificates for draftees to skip military service, Fridinsky said. They took 207 bribes worth over 10 million roubles ($317,900) during one conscription drive.

Elite airborne troops received faulty parachutes for landing military hardware, inflicting damage of around 280 million roubles on the military budget, he said. (Editing by Louise Ireland)