Defence minister who can do no wrong faces pivotal test
Putin’s hunting buddy Gen Sergei Shoigu in spotlight after assurances invasion is going to plan
VLADIMIR PUTIN was at pains to give the impression that the Ukraine war was going well at a meeting staged for the television cameras this week.
“Everything is going according to plan, Vladimir Vladimirovich, everything is going according to plan,” Gen Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defence minister, assured him.
But what little in the way of independent reporting is able to make it out of Russia suggests that is far from true.
Two senior figures in the FSB intelligence service, the successor to the KGB, have reportedly been placed under house arrest. Sergei Beseda, the head of the FSB’s foreign intelligence department, and his deputy are being held for corruption and providing false information about Ukraine. The reports are impossible to confirm, but they come from Andrei Soldatov, one of the most respected, well-informed independent journalists in Russia.
Beseda was in charge of intelligence operations in Ukraine, and the reports appear to match claims by an alleged FSB whistle-blower that officers were ordered to produce assessments that “made Russia look good”.
If true, the reports would indicate Mr Putin is far from happy with the slow progress of the war – and that the intelligence services rather than the military have borne the brunt of his anger.
That has put the defence minister in the spotlight. Before the invasion, Gen Shoigu was widely credited with modernising the Russian military, and was spoken of as a potential successor to Mr Putin. More than two weeks into the war, the army is yet to take Kyiv, and his reputation has taken a battering.
Yet his continued high profile in Moscow suggests Mr Putin at least does not blame him.
Mr Putin, an ex-KGB officer, appears to trust Gen Shoigu more than the intelligence services.
“Shoigu is an interesting figure because he is the one member of the inner circle who has something you could describe as a form of friendship with Putin,” says Emily Ferris of the Royal United Services Institute think tank (RUSI).
“They go hunting together. There are all these photos of them out in the forest in Siberia. That’s something different from the professional relationship Mr Putin has with the others.”
Though it is hard to imagine Mr Putin as the great outdoors type or a man to go on a fishing trip, that is the image he tries to project in pictures of his buddy trips with Gen Shoigu released by the Kremlin. Gen Shoigu is part ethnic Tuvan, an indigenous Siberian people who live near Russia’s border with Mongolia, and Mr Putin appears to enjoy playing up his defence minister’s roots.
Military victories in Crimea and Syria gave him considerable prestige and made him hugely popular with the Russian public.
And he is deeply implicated in the regime’s misdeeds. As defence minister he oversaw the bombardment of civilian areas in Syria and the razing of large parts of Aleppo.
Although he is seen as a rival of the intelligence services, he presides over the powerful GRU military intelligence service, which has been implicated in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury.
Yet he remains an enigmatic figure. While some in the inner circle, such as Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB, and Sergei Naryshkin, the chief of the SVR foreign intelligence service, are said to share Putin’s anti-Western world view, Gen Shoigu is harder to pin down.
“I’ve always found Shoigu pretty inscrutable,” says Ms Ferris of RUSI. “It’s hard to know what he’s thinking.”
While most ordinary Russians’ only source of information about the war is now heavily censored state media, the same is not true of the high command.
“They must have access to intelligence and information that shows things aren’t the way Putin describes, that it isn’t all a Western plot against Russia,” says Ms Ferris.
“But I’m not sure it matters what they think at this point. You saw in the final national security council meeting before the invasion that Putin isn’t consulting them. Having an opinion isn’t part of the job. The job is to implement what Putin decides.”
And Gen Shoigu has made a career out of it. In many ways, he is the great survivor of Russian politics. Apart from Mr Putin, he is the only minister from the Boris Yeltsin era still in a position of power. His critics say he has done it by being a careerist “yes man”.
Sergei Konvis, a fellow Tuvan and opposition publisher who went to school with Gen Shoigu, has described him as a “professional chameleon”.
Despite his general’s rank and the fact he regularly appears in military uniform, Gen Shoigu was never a professional soldier. The nearest he came was serving as a lieutenant in the reserves. He owes his rank to a Russian tradition of making defence ministers generals. He trained as a civil engineer and first rose to prominence as minister in charge of emergency management in the dying days of the Soviet Union.
He made a name for himself with his hands-on approach, dashing to the scenes of floods, earthquakes and terror attacks, but his detractors say it was all an act for the cameras.
He was once talked of as a potential successor to Mr Yeltsin – until Mr Putin came on the scene. When that happened Gen Shoigu pivoted and became his loyal friend and minister.
In 2012 Mr Putin rewarded him by promoting him to defence minister. Gen Shoigu is credited with modernising the Russian military, which had become plagued by corruption since the end of the Soviet Union, but his critics dispute that.
It was his predecessor, Anatoly Serdyukov, who turned the military round, according to Kamil Galeev, an independent Russian researcher and journalist known for his Twitter threads explaining the war. “Serdyukov fought with interest groups and was destroyed. Shoigu was smarter than that,” wrote Mr Galeev. “He launched a PR campaign presenting himself as the ‘saviour’ from Serdyukov’s legacy. Whatever his predecessor did was dismantled.”
The war in Ukraine could prove decisive for Gen Shoigu’s future. If it fails, he could be cast out of Mr Putin’s inner circle and cut off from the wealth and lifestyle it offers. Or he could find himself propelled to even higher office.