Vladimir Putin put Sergei Shoigu in charge of an invasion in 2022 with orders to capture Kyiv within in a matter of days.
Two years on, Russia’s president has ousted his defence minister to achieve an altogether different mission in Ukraine: making Russia’s creaking war machine go on for as long as it takes.
The surprise Kremlin shake-up this weekend, which elevated an economic technocrat to lead the war effort, indicates Putin has bet on the power of Russia’s military-industrial complex to outlast Ukraine and its western backers.
“Putin has finally understood that the war has entered a new phase, that of a battle of resources . . . of who has more and whose supply chains are better organised,” said Alexei Venediktov, journalist and editor of the Echo of Moscow radio station.
“It just took a year to realise that there won’t be quick success, a lightning victory or a lightning defeat. Not a breakthrough, but slow steps forward like we see now.”
Putin has tasked Andrei Belousov with overseeing Russia’s record Rbs10.8tn ($117.2bn) in defence spending, which the Kremlin said needed a civilian in charge to “meet the dynamics of the current moment”.
It is a moment when Russia has gained the upper hand. Its forces have made advances in the eastern Donbas region and threaten a breakthrough in Kharkiv against Ukraine’s outmanned, outgunned army as it waits for long-delayed US aid.
“Implementing this change of guard in the middle of an offensive, you have to be feeling very confident in order to do so,” said Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist.
“He clearly felt that things were going so well in and of themselves that he could remove the defence minister — while keeping the chief of general staff — without damaging anything in terms of the war effort,” she said.
When announcing Belousov’s appointment, the Kremlin made it clear he would mostly focus on building up Russia’s defence sector, where factories are working in multiple shifts to boost the production of weapons and ammunition several times over.
Belousov “understands very well what resources are and how to best expend them . . . his task, as I understand it, will be to finesse the juncture between the frontline and the rear in such a way that everything will function smoothly”, Venediktov said.
The changes, made after Putin was sworn in for a fifth term that will extend his rule until at least 2030, are part of new appointments pointing to the defence sector’s primacy to Putin’s vision of how to win the war.
Denis Manturov, Russia’s industry minister, was promoted to a role of top deputy prime minister overseeing the defence sector.
Manturov is close to Sergei Chemezov, a former KGB colleague of Putin’s in the then East Germany who now heads the sprawling Rostec defence conglomerate. Manturov told reporters on Monday Belousov was his “very close comrade” and a “professional person who gets deep into the issues assigned to him”, according to Interfax.
Despite the Kremlin’s triumphant claims about arms factories working around the clock, signs of serious fissures in Russia’s defence production have emerged in recent months.
In March, Putin appointed Andrei Bulyga as a deputy defence minister in charge of logistics, making him the fourth person to hold the post during the war. “That tells you there are serious problems with logistics,” said Pavel Luzin, a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Russia’s rate of fire, while still much greater than Ukraine’s, has also fallen from 60,000 shells a day in the war’s first half-year to 10,000 today. The ministry is wearing down artillery barrels faster than it can make new ones and has admitted it can only produce at most half of the shells needed for a major breakthrough.
Luzin said: “Belousov may have been asked to try and get the black hole of military spending under control, which is hard for even the government to predict these days.”
The ascetic Belousov is a major stylistic clash with Shoigu, who regularly appeared in a general’s uniform bedecked with medals despite never having served a day in the military.
One senior western official said the key takeaway was that Russia was committed to a long-term build-up of the country’s military industrial complex.
“There is a clear perception that they want someone who has the ability to professionally run a war economy for a very long time . . . and someone who is not corrupt,” the official said of Belousov’s appointment. “It’s worrying that they are getting prepared for such a long-term approach.”
“Sure, he’s not from a military background but neither was Shoigu despite walking around in camouflage all the time,” the official added.
As Russia’s war turned sour in the fall of 2022, Shoigu became a target of rare, officially sanctioned ire from hardliners. Putin ultimately backed Shoigu over Yevgeny Prigozhin the hardliners’ leader, who died in 2023 after leading a rebellion to topple Shoigu and other military leaders.
But discontent continued to bubble within the army, as prominent commanders clashed with the defence minister and the chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov. Putin has kept Gerasimov in his post, for now, but expectations were that he, too, would eventually be let go, said a person close to the defence ministry.
“Shoigu wanted to run the army himself and his ambitions got in the way. Belousov doesn’t have ambitions to command the troops,” a former senior Kremlin official said.
Last month Russian security services arrested Timur Ivanov, one of Shoigu’s closest aides and the deputy defence minister with responsibility for construction. The move was widely interpreted as a blow to Shoigu and an admission that Moscow has poor control over how its surging military funding is spent.
But despite being replaced as defence minister, Shoigu’s new appointment as head of Russia’s security council is ostensibly a promotion — replacing Nikolai Patrushev, one of Putin’s longest-standing confidants and most prominent ideologues of Russia’s crusade against the west.
“To those outside looking in, it looks like Shoigu is failing upwards. But to Putin, he’s being rewarded for his loyalty and his long service,” said Dara Massicot, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The Kremlin has said Patrushev will take up an unspecified new post in the coming days.
One senior western diplomat said Patrushev’s fate was being closely watched to see if Putin’s reshuffle of the two men was heavily influenced by Russia’s war performance, or if it had more to do with corruption allegations against Shoigu.
A sign Patrushev was being cast aside would suggest the Kremlin was actively trying to address problems in its security services exposed by its failings in Ukraine, the diplomat said.
Patrushev took part in a security council meeting with Putin on Monday, while his son Dmitry was appointed a deputy prime minister, indicating he remained in favour to some degree.
A more important motive for Putin, however, may have been the desire to weaken Shoigu, and perhaps also Patrushev, two heavyweights who each have their own clans and retinues.
“They may have both had plans for the inevitable post-Putin era,” Schulmann said. “Late personalistic autocracies fear such things.”
The Kremlin was not “sitting there focused on how best to run the country”, Schulmann said. “It’s not thinking about that. It’s thinking about how to stay in power.”
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