(TND) — Russian President Vladimir Putin switched up the makeup of his Cabinet by installing a new defense minister as he starts a fifth term in office and the war in Ukraine continues to slog into its third year with no end in sight with Russian troops mounting another offensive.
Putin replaced longtime ally and defense minister Sergei Shoigu in a decree published over the weekend, installing an economist in his place in a significant shake-up to the Kremlin’s defense structure and acknowledgement of the economic changes and challenges that come with a long-lasting war in Ukraine.
The change-up comes at the same time as Russian troops making advanced in the Kharkiv region, which is Ukraine’s second-largest city outside of the capital of Kyiv. Thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been forced to flee amid a Russian battering of towns and villages with artillery and mortar shelling.
Andrei Belousov, who has served as an economic adviser, will take over as defense minister once Russia’s parliament, which serves as a rubber stamp to Putin’s policy goals, approves the appointment.
Belousov is replacing Sergei Shoigu, who had been in the position since 2012, and is facing higher scrutiny amid struggles on the battlefield against Ukrainian forces that are significantly out-gunned and out-manned and have held off what Russia expected to be an easy invasion and takeover of Ukraine.
The Kremlin cited the growing financial needs the war is placing on the Russian economy as part of its rationale for installing an economist at the top of its military. Russia’s economy has repeatedly been hit with sanctions and other hiccups as a result from the invasion of Ukraine. The war has also slogged on for three years, which has forced the country to recalibrate its economic outputs to cater to what’s shaping up to be a long and grueling war.
Nearly a third of Russia’s budget will be spent on national defense this year, a huge jump that has boosted economic figures but also brings challenges for the future.
“There are two possible signals here. One is Putin is concerned about how everything is gonna go real cockeyed eventually with all the expenses of this horrific war so he wants somebody who has a better sense of how to finance the war,” said Ian Kelly, ambassador in residence at Northwestern University and a former State Department diplomat.
Shoigu’s shortfalls in Ukraine led to a short-lived mutiny from the leader of a Russian mercenary group Wagner that had rolled toward Moscow before turning back around in another example of the scrutiny surrounding Shoigu.
A deputy defense minister was also recently arrested on bribery charges, which raised questions of corruption within the government in addition to the frustrations with the way the invasion of Ukraine has gone for Russia.
“The other signal is about showing there are quite a lot of stories about corruption at the highest levels of the Defense Department and (former Wagner leader Yevgeny) Prigozhin was hopping mad about Shoigu was managing the Ministry of Defense and marched on Moscow to demand that Shoigu and the defense chief of staff both be fired,” Kellys aid. “Putin is not the kind of guy who would want to show the kind of weakness to fire a guy right away. This may have been just a waiting period between those two events to do what had to be done.”
The decision comes shortly after Putin was reelected to another six-year term in what U.S. officials have described as a sham of an election amid the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent. But it also cemented Putin’s fixture atop the Russian government that has received some pushback for the invasion of Ukraine, which has battered the Russian economy and caused tens of thousands of people to flee the country.
Russia analysts have predicted Putin would be further emboldened to act more aggressively toward Ukraine and the West with the security of another six-year term, which also gave him the opportunity to change his Cabinet.
“There's no events like an election on the horizon. There's absolutely no organized opposition against them, there are no media voices that are naysaying about the war,” Kelly said. “There could be some black swans that bring the whole thing down but right now, Putin seems to have everything under control.”
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