Vladimir Putin carried out a rare reshuffle on Sunday, May 12, and replaced his emblematic Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, with Andreï Belooussov, a trained economist with no military background. In the foreign press, analysts believe that this change shows a turning point in the war in Ukraine: Moscow wants to monitor war spending, to better prolong it, and to fight against corruption.
As the American daily notes The New York Times, the cabinet reshuffle “represents a rare change for Putin, who tends to avoid abrupt changes.” Andrei Belousov, 65, worked in academia before joining the government in 1999. He was first vice-president of the last government since 2020 and one of Vladimir Putin’s main economic advisers in recent years. He was briefly Minister of Economic Development between May 2012 and June 2013.
According to the New York newspaper, “by appointing an economist, Putin has tacitly recognized the importance of industrial power for any military victory”, and seeks to show that Russia has “the economic capacity necessary to fight a long-term war “.
Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political analyst, claims on messaging app Telegram that “Russia does not want a long war. But to avoid a long war, you have to be very well prepared […]. Belousov’s task is to create a modern Russian army with which the West will not want to go to war, but to make peace.”
“Pragmatic” management of war spending
Andrei Beloussov participated, explains New York Times, to the management of the Russian economy in the face of Western sanctions and its stabilization. Technical qualities that would be well received by the Kremlin to better manage war money. For the Financial Times, a British liberal economic newspaper which cites Russian sources and analysts, Belousov’s “surprise appointment” as head of the Defense Ministry “indicates that the president wants a major change in the management of the invasion of Ukraine.” In this case, that Putin wants “to exercise closer control over Russia’s record defense spending (10.8 billion rubles, or $117.2 billion), and that he needs a flexible and pragmatic civil servant to achieve this,” according to these sources.
Nearly a third of Russia’s federal budget has been allocated to national defense this year, as Russia has massively increased its industrial military production over the past two years, with “total defense spending estimated to reach 7.5% of its GDP”, according to The Guardian, a center-left British newspaper. “The Kremlin wants the ministry to be headed by an economist who knows how to rationalize its operations,” explains to the daily a former defense official who worked with ex-minister Sergei Shoigu.
However, Andreï Beloussov has always argued in favor of an important role for the State in the economy. “He was one of those who saw the state as the main driving force behind everything,” Financial Times Konstantin Sonin, economist and professor at the University of Chicago, who is on the list of people wanted by the Russian government for his criticism of the Kremlin and who has known the new minister for more than twenty years. According to him, the “Putin soldier” took over the “macroeconomist” when Belousov entered the civil service. He became an advocate of policies “such as taxes on the windfall profits of Russian commodity exporters” and capital controls.
Quoted by the Moscow Times, a Russian daily in English, the researcher at the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace Andrei Kolesnikov judges on of GDP”. But according to him, “this is what caused the USSR to explode.”
Fight against corruption
The appointment of Belousov, a trusted technocrat to head the Defense Ministry, could also indicate that the Kremlin, having turned a blind eye to the corruption that has grown alongside military spending, will now launch a campaign to “to stop this sector”, further notes the New York Timesreferring to the arrest last month of one of Sergei Shoigu’s main deputies, accused of having received bribes.
According to a source “who has known Putin and Beloussov for decades” cited by the Financial Times, the latter “is absolutely not corrupt. And it will be very different from what we currently have in the Ministry of Defense. Sergei Shoigu and everyone around him were businessmen.” This same source adds, however, that “Beloussov does not claim to lead the army like a general with all his medals. He is a technocrat.”
Military decisions may not be his business
The decision to make Putin’s former economic adviser the head of the army shows, according to the left-wing German daily The Tageszeitungthat “the war in Ukraine is now the basis of the Russian economy”, but also that it is “the chief of staff and Putin himself who are likely to be responsible for military decisions”.
In The Guardian, the anonymous former defense official also believes that “decisions on the battlefield will be left to the military.” “It is clear that no one expects direct leadership of the troops from the new minister,” said a columnist from the Moskovsky Komsomolets, a Russian tabloid daily. “In Russian politics and power vertical, there is only one truly irreplaceable person. That man is Vladimir Putin himself.”