By a strange twist of circumstances, just when the budget was finally approved by the State Duma last week, the Military Prosecutor's Office laid charges against Col. Gen. Grigory Oleinik, the financial head at the Defense Ministry. Oleinik is accused of having cost the state almost half a billion dollars by "overstepping his authority."

But what about the billions of defense dollars the state stands to lose anyway? During the battles over the budget, one of the main criteria used in assessing this or that defense program was how difficult it would be to steal the allocated money.

There's no question that theft in Russia's armed forces has reached a grandiose scale. But it wouldn't be right to lay the blame entirely at the feet of a demoralized officer corps.

The whole system of relations between the state and the armed forces incites theft. The state channels over a quarter of its income into defense, but exactly how this money is spent is shrouded in secrecy. Not only the military brass, but government officials at the highest levels are eager to get their hands on the defense budget.

Oleinik was not accused of misappropriation, but of "overstepping his authority," and this is not just chance. According to the most probable version of events, Oleinik was by no means chiefly responsible for the disappearance of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The whole incident took place in December 1996. At that time, the state was desperately looking for extra income, and the Tax Ministry discovered that Gazprom owed the treasury $450 million but didn't have the resources to pay.

Several Cabinet ministers then came up with a plan to get hold of the money. The Defense Ministry transferred the needed sum to Gazprom, and a Ukrainian company that owed money to Gazprom agreed to cover its debt by supplying building materials. The Ukrainian company, however, didn't keep up its part of the deal, and the Defense Ministry never got its outlay back.

Oleinik, of course, was not born yesterday and had to have known that he was putting his signature to an absolutely illegal document. But at that time, he'd been in his job only a month and knew what would happen if he refused to carry out the order from above.

This all indicates another problem – commanding officers in the armed forces are to this day in a situation like that of serfs, having to carry out any orders coming from their bosses, even illegal ones, if they want to keep their chance of climbing the career ladder. They know, too, that it's better not to tire the top brass with complaints about lack of money to feed soldiers, purchase fuel supplies and so on. The Army still lives on the principle of stealing to survive.

Sooner or later, any regiment commander comes to the conclusion that the only way to get money is to use his soldiers as slaves. Sooner or later, the commander starts renting them out to the local grain-processing plants or state farms.

Of course, the commander knows he's breaking the law, and if he's caught, he knows he'll never be able to prove that he spent the illegally earned money not on himself, but on the soldiers. Since he's going to have to steal anyway, then, he starts siphoning money into his own pockets and soon becomes a banal criminal.

So long as reform of the armed forces hasn't begun, allocating state money for combat preparedness or new arms purchases is more or less a senseless enterprise. Without a transparent reporting and accounting system, the money will just disappear without a trace.