The Main Military Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee intends to ask the 235th Garrison Military Court to place Vasilyev under arrest for two months, RBC reported, citing two sources familiar with the investigation. The hearing is scheduled for Tuesday; until then he remains in a temporary detention facility.
The Defense Ministry told RBC that it is cooperating with the investigation and called intolerance of corruption among officials an unconditional priority for the ministry. The ministry did not report Vasilyev's detention.
This is not the first criminal case surrounding Patriot. In the first days of October, two of Vasilyev's deputies, Sergei Fedosov and Alexei Pavlyukov, were detained in bribery and fraud cases. According to a Fontanka source close to the investigation, the trigger was their receipt of about 100 million rubles from businessmen, in exchange for which Patriot representatives helped the businessmen obtain fictitious contracts.
Another deputy director of the park, Vitaly Melimuk, was sent to a pretrial detention center on charges of accepting a bribe of 18 million rubles.
The previous director of Patriot, Vyacheslav Akhmedov, received five years in a penal colony in August 2025 for fraud and official forgery. According to the investigation, he was involved in the use of money intended for the park to build and renovate the country house of former Deputy Defense Minister Pavel Popov, who oversaw the park at the ministry.
In April, former Deputy Defense Minister Pavel Popov was sentenced to 19 years for fraud, bribery and abuse of office; an appeal later reduced the term to ten years.
Vasilyev took charge of the park in Kubinka, outside Moscow, in March 2026. Before that he was governor of the Kirov region, headed Rosreestr, served as an auditor at the Accounts Chamber and as deputy head of Rosstat. He was born in Leningrad, is a graduate of the Academy of Foreign Intelligence, worked in the mid-1980s in the KGB Directorate for Leningrad and the Leningrad Region, and later in the First Main Directorate of the KGB of the USSR.