According to the "Argumenti Nedeli" publication, 30,000 body armor vests intended to protect the lives of mobilized soldiers in Russia turned out to be counterfeit: they were not assembled in factories, but in ordinary garages and offices by migrant workers.
In November 2022, the "Piket" company was engaged in ordinary construction work. However, according to documents, the head of the firm, Andrey Yesipov, secured a 2.4 billion ruble contract from the Ministry of Defense. The company was obligated to supply 30,000 helmets and 30,000 body armor vests for mobilized citizens.
There were no problems with the helmets, but it was impossible to purchase the required number of body armor covers (plate carriers) from China. To avoid returning the 1.26 billion ruble advance received from the state, the company's management devised a secret plan. They purchased cheap tactical vests at Moscow's "Sadovod" market. The protective plates inserted into these vests consisted of pieces of unknown metal that had no certificates whatsoever.
To make these low-quality parts look like real military body armor, the company's management relied not on factories or specialized workshops, but on ordinary offices and garages. Migrants were massively recruited for this clandestine process. The company's head of security, Mikhail Kalchenko, was responsible for finding these migrants and involving them in the work in the garages. As cheap labor, the migrants inserted fake armor plates into the tactical vests and applied counterfeit markings and readiness labels. By the spring of 2023, 30,000 such "homemade" body armor vests had been assembled by the migrants.
These products, assembled in garage conditions, could not protect soldiers at all. According to the contract, they were supposed to have high-level protection of classes BR4 and BR5.
However, in the vests assembled by the migrants:
- The Kevlar material, which is the primary protective layer, was completely absent. - Special shock-absorbing pads were not installed. - They provided poor protection against bullets and offered no protection against shell fragments (shrapnel).
Military officials accepted the products without conducting any tests, relying on fake certificates issued by shell organizations.
After this scheme was exposed, the damage caused to the state was estimated at over 2 billion rubles. The main organizer of the fraud, Andrey Yesipov, has already been sentenced to 8 years in prison. Currently, the prosecution is seeking 11 years for chief accountant Viktoriya Antonova and 8 years for Mikhail Kalchenko, who was responsible for hiring the migrants.
