Russian President Vladimir Putin’s surprise late-night shuffle of his defense and security team signals his determination to mobilize Russia’s war economy for a long and intensified conflict in Ukraine against the West.
Putin named his former economy aide and First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov, 65, to be Russia’s new defense minister. Belousov replaces Sergei Shoigu, 68, who had been defense minister since 2012 and is being transferred to a new role as secretary of Russia’s security council. Nikolai Patrushev, a longtime ally of Putin who had held that post, was dismissed and is due to take another, unspecified job.
The appointment of Belousov, who has long advocated greater state control of the economy, “isn’t about military leadership,” Tatyana Stanovaya, founder of the political consultancy R.Politik, said on Telegram.
Photo: AP
“This is about ‘Gosplan’ in the military-industrial complex,” she said, a reference to the Soviet-era state-planning system.
Putin came to his decision to appoint Belousov in part because he is a student of history and had in mind the example of former US secretary of defense Robert McNamara, a person familiar with the government deliberations said, asking not to be identified discussing an internal matter.
As defense secretary under US presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, McNamara overhauled military procurement to improve efficiency.
Putin’s ouster of Shoigu, one of his closest allies, might reflect frustration at the failure to defeat Ukraine in a war that was meant to last for days and is now in its third year, with hundreds of thousands of Russian troops killed or wounded. The defense minister was the target of last year’s aborted mutiny by Wagner mercenary leader Yevgeny Prighozin, who accused him of repeated failures on the battlefield.
Russian troops are advancing in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, in a new offensive. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said late on Sunday that defense forces were holding their positions in fierce battles, calling the situation “extremely difficult.”
Putin’s determined to achieve a minimum war goal of seizing full control of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, following the years-long separatist conflict that provided his justification for the February 2022 invasion, two people familiar with Russia’s strategy said.
Like Shoigu, Belousov arrives at the defense ministry with no military background. With Ukraine starting to receive tens of billions of US dollars in new military aid from its US and European allies, Russia faces the challenge of maximizing the impact of its own defense spending, which is surging to historically high levels.
State spending on the defense ministry and Russia’s security sector is approaching 6.7 percent of GDP, nearing levels reached by the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said yesterday, according to the Interfax news service.
While spending levels are not yet “critical,” Putin chose Belousov because of the need for “economic competitiveness” at the defense ministry, the report quoted Peskov as saying.
“Belousov’s appointment is a sign that the Russian economy is being transformed into a war economy,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Moscow.
The shuffle is the most far-reaching shake-up since 2020, when Putin named Mikhail Mishustin to replace Dmitry Medvedev as prime minister. Months later, Putin overhauled the constitution to allow him two more mandates, which means he could rule to 2036, when he would be 83. Mishustin was reappointed last week to continue as prime minister. Medvedev has been deputy head of the security council since 2020.
Kremlin watchers will be keenly monitoring the fate of Patrushev, 72, who had been the hawkish head of the security council since 2008 and played a key role in the invasion of Ukraine.
The former KGB agent succeeded Putin as Federal Security Service chief when the latter was named Russia’s prime minister in 1999 and Patrushev continued in that post to 2008.
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