“He was given the defence portfolio despite having no military background,” the BBC wrote of Sergei Shoigu, and the remark explains some of what followed. In May 2024 the Kremlin announced that Vladimir Putin was removing his long-standing ally from the defence ministry after twelve years.
Andrei Belousov, an economist serving as deputy prime minister, was named as replacement. Shoigu was to become secretary of Russia’s Security Council instead.
The warning signs
Talk that Shoigu’s grip was slipping had gone around for months. Then came April, when his deputy Timur Ivanov was arrested on corruption charges. The BBC called that a rare move against someone so senior.
The war added pressure. Moscow expected a campaign lasting a few weeks, yet the fighting had entered a third year, with setbacks and large losses of troops and equipment. In 2023 Shoigu had also been dragged into a public row with Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, who led a brief mutiny against Moscow. In viral audio messages Prigozhin labelled the minister a “dirtbag” and an “elderly clown”. The Wagner chief died that August when his plane crashed on a flight from St Petersburg to Moscow. The Kremlin denied it was to blame.
Shoigu keeps a strong position on paper. Even so, the BBC judged the switch to look like a demotion. Whether Nikolai Patrushev, the council’s present head, stays on was unclear.
What the Kremlin said
The Kremlin’s explanation was short: the ministry needed to remain “innovative”. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov expanded on it, saying a civilian pick showed the post called for “innovation”. He compared Russia’s position to the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, when military spending took a high proportion of GDP, and said that spending now had to be fitted better into the overall economy.
His summary was blunt. “The one who is more open to innovations is the one who will be victorious on the battlefield,” Peskov said.
Analysts told the BBC that the choice shows Putin trying to line up the economy with the war effort. They also pointed to the huge sums now going into the conflict and the need for the armed forces to use them more efficiently.
Two men, two backgrounds
Shoigu is a civil engineer by profession. He became prominent in the 1990s heading the emergencies and disaster relief ministry, and he is close enough to Putin to take him on fishing trips in Siberia, where Shoigu was born. Some senior officers disliked having a man without a military career above them.
Belousov, by contrast, is described by unnamed officials cited in The Bell as a “hard-line defender of the state, who believes that Russia is encircled by enemies”. He was a Putin aide for several years before becoming deputy prime minister, and reportedly stood alone among the president’s economic advisers in backing the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Like Putin, he is said to be close to the Russian Orthodox Church and to have done karate and sambo as a young man.
Putin had been sworn in for a fifth time as president only days earlier, on a Tuesday, after an election win with 87% of the vote and no credible challengers. He has led Russia since January 2000.
Sources
- Vladimir Putin removes Sergei Shoigu from Russian defence ministry
- Vladimir Putin removes Sergei Shoigu from Russian defence ministry
