In December 2024, at a session of the Council for Strategic Development, President Vladimir Putin ordered Manturov to account for the construction of waste-processing plants.
“Denis Valentinovich, the plants we were planning — where are they? Rostec was supposed to be building them?”
Manturov was about to explain, once again, that they were almost there, that in a year or two it would all be done, Vladimir Vladimirovich — but Putin cut him off on the spot.
“I want to understand how many plants they were supposed to build. Five? By what deadline? Did they receive the money or not? Where is the money?”
This was far from the first time Manturov had answered for Rostec’s failures. Putin had earlier set out complaints in the same categorical manner about the pace of deliveries — first and foremost on the defence order, and on import substitution in aviation. And that second area matters to Putin no less: Russia stands on the threshold of changes that imply international air travel being open again.
But Chemezov and Manturov have no use for changes of that kind, because they both live off the military order. The first, without troubling himself unduly, turns out weapons to Soviet patterns, and it brings him billions. The second has grown too deeply into Chemezov’s defence arrangements.
Back in the 2000s, as head of Oboronprom, Manturov assembled his starting capital on the sale of the land under arms plants across Moscow. Chemezov taught him that. They are still at it to this day. But that is only one line of enrichment. Companies connected to Manturov and his family were receiving shares in defence plants right up to 2010. And between 2022 and 2025 a group of defence enterprises paid his 89-year-old mother billions of roubles in repayment of debts and interest on loans.
“As long as the president is satisfied with the result — the defence enterprises are working and filling their orders — none of this attracts any attention. But the moment a failure occurs somewhere in that system, its participants will be reminded of everything at once,” says a man with access to the Kremlin’s corridors.
And that failure has occurred.
Under the aviation industry development programme, 120 aircraft were to be delivered in 2026. In the first half of the year only a single airframe was handed over. So the officials responsible, Manturov among them, promptly adjusted the programme: in the new version, 1,081 airframes by 2030 have been replaced by 570 aircraft by 2035.
After that Putin’s patience ran out: this month the tax service froze the account of Manturov’s daughter Leonela. It is obvious that the next in line will be Manturov’s unspeakably rich mother, and so on all the way up to the man himself. Russia’s minister of industry is being deprived of the thing he loves so much — money. And the next thing will be… power.
