In the middle of most important Russian offensive since the beginning of the “special operation”, Putin shuffles the cards moving some of the most important men in his entourage from place to place. Starting with Sergei Shoigu, the Minister of Defense who has been in the government since the Yeltsin era and who leaves the ministry to go to the Security Council. In his place an expert in economics and rationalization of public spending, Andrei Belousovwhich will have to carry out a thorough clean-up in one of the most corrupt Russian centers of power.
Belousov was deputy prime minister and will now take charge of what has become the greatest spending and driving center of the country’s economy. According to the most recent calculations, the war effort accounts for 6.7 percent of domestic product, “almost at the level of the 1980s”, explained Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. Precisely in that period, at the height of the Cold War, military expenditure absorbed 7.4 percent of everything produced in the Soviet Union.
We have seen that the defense problem was now a mess the recent arrest of Timur Ivanov, one of the deputy ministers who was responsible for supervising military construction projects. “Corruption sometimes goes beyond any reasonable limit,” commented analyst Sergei Markov, who is very close to Kremlin circles. According to Putin’s spokesman, Chief of Staff Gerasimov “will remain in his place.”
Shoigu moves to the role of secretary of the Security Councila sort of modern version of the old Politburo, which includes the Tsar’s loyalists. Nikolai Patrushev then leaves his chair, who grew up in the KGB like Putin, who perhaps had assumed too much power and had gained excessive autonomy. So much so that he had long since started the rumor that his son had already been identified as a candidate to succeed the president. Voice that, perhaps, annoyed the number one.
For now it has not been clarified what the “important position” that Patrushev will be called upon to cover will be. It could be that of vice-president of the same Council (a role currently occupied by Dmitry Medvedev, former prime minister and former president) or as head of the Kremlin administration. This is a position currently held by a bureaucrat who has never had a leading role, Anton Vajno. In that position Patrushev would be closer to Putin and under his direct control.
There had been talk several times about the removal of Shoigu from the Defense Department, including on the occasion of very violent clash which pitted him, together with Gerasimov, against the leader of the Wagner mercenaries Evgeny Prigozhin. On various occasions, including after Prigozhin’s attempted coup, Shoigu disappeared from circulation for days. But everything suggests that what happened yesterday was not a removal but a promotion. Among other things, the former minister will also lead, directly under Putin, the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation, a body which has been given autonomy and which will have a general supervisory task.
In any case, the new shuffle tends to demonstrate a basic rule in the power system in Moscow: no one is irreplaceable, everyone can be removed. Except Vladimir Vladimirovich.
