If your boss gives you one job, and you aren’t able to accomplish that one job in two plus years, there’s an excellent chance of your ass getting canned.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose military has been criticized at home for a perceived lack of progress and heavy losses during its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, announced that he was replacing longtime ally Sergei Shoigu as defense minister.
The Kremlin said that Shoigu, 66, would be replaced by former First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov, 65, a little-known politician who specializes in economic matters.
Replacing a 66 year old with a 65 year old? That’s some mighty fine youth movement you’ve got going on there, Vlad…
Shoigu, who has been defense minister since 2012 and has been leading Russia’s military through its full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began in 2022, has been named to head Russia’s Security Council, which advises the president on national security matters.
The Kremlin said that as part of Shoigu’s Security Council duties, the former defense chief will advise on matters involving military-industrial issues.
He will replace Nikolai Patrushev as head of the Security Council. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Patrushev’s next position will be announced in the coming days.
Russia’s upper house of parliament, the Federation Council — which also announced the changes — said Putin has proposed reappointing Sergei Lavrov as Russia’s foreign minister.
British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps said Russia’s next defense chief will be another Putin “puppet.”
Ya think?
“Sergei Shoigu has overseen over 355,000 casualties amongst his own soldiers & mass civilian suffering with an illegal campaign in Ukraine,” he wrote on X.
“Russia needs a Defense Minister who would undo that disastrous legacy & end the invasion – but all they’ll get is another of Putin’s puppets.”
The buck for Russia’s persistent inability to conquer the much smaller Ukraine ultimately stops at Putin, so sacking Shoigu will probably be as effective at winning the war as shuffling the deck chairs on the Moskva. Vast incompetence, corruption and general military rot was allowed to fester under Shoigu’s watch, but Russian military problems predate not only his tenure, but even the Soviet Union. Traditionally Russia got its ass kicked in the first year of a war, learned from its mistakes, and used an endless supply of canon fodder to wear its enemies down.
Russia no longer has that endless supply of manpower. The Russian way of war was wasteful and incompetent long before the current slaughter, and now it’s unsuccessful and unsustainable. Ukraine is destroying a half-century of stockpiled Soviet weapons using largely NATO surplus equipment, and however the war ends, Russia will no longer be seen as a great military power, much less a near-peer to the US and NATO. Russia occasionally seems to act more competently than they did in the early phases of the war, but they’re still using meatgrinder tactics that slaughter their own troops. Their notorious lack of NCOs means institutional knowledge has been hard to retain and transmit in the best of circumstances, and these are not the best of circumstances.
In a normal society, the Russian military obvious dysfunction would fall squarely on the head of Shoigu, but Russia is not a normal society. The Russian military needs reform, but it’s needed reform for pretty much the entirety of its post-Soviet existence (and much of its Soviet existence to boot). Shoigu was appointed Minister of Defense precisely because he wasn’t a reformer, as predecessor Anatoly Serdyukov had attempted to reform the military, and had stepped on far too many well-shod corrupt toes in the process.
Shoigu’s successor Andrei Belousov doesn’t exactly have typical profile you’d expect from a Minister of Defense:
He studied economics at Moscow State University and graduated with honors in 1981.
From 1981 to 1986, Belousov was probationer-researcher and then junior researcher in the simulation laboratory of human-machine systems of the Central Economic Mathematical Institute.
If you were a full-time student in the Soviet Union during the period, you could avoid compulsory military service by going straight into the reserve officer services without actually doing any actual military duty. That timeline suggests Belousov went that route.
From 1991 to 2006, he was head of laboratory in the Institute of Economic Forecasting in the Russian Academy of Science. He was external advisor to prime minister from 2000 to 2006.
Belousov served as deputy minister of economic development and trade for two years from 2006 to 2008.
From 2008 to 2012, he was director of the finances and economic department in the Russian Prime Minister’s office.
Belousov has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation.
On 21 May 2012, he was appointed minister of economic development to the cabinet led by prime minister Dimitri Medvedev. Belousov succeeded Elvira Nabiullina as minister of economic development.
On 24 June 2013, he was appointed as Putin’s Presidential Assistant in Economic Affairs.
On 21 January 2020, Belousov was appointed as First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia in Mikhail Mishustin’s Cabinet. From 30 April to 19 May 2020, Belousov was appointed by Vladimir Putin as Acting Prime Minister of Russia, temporarily replacing Mikhail Mishustin, after the latter was diagnosed with coronavirus. According to Politico, he is one possible successor to Putin.
So he’s a Putin toady with no military background. He will probably come in with considerable authority, but no knowledge of where the bodies are buried, or which members of the general staff are lying to him (probably all of them). The thermocline of truth is a danger for any organization, especially a national military, especially for a dictatorship where regime critics suffer alarmingly high rates of defenestration.
Can a career political functionary with no military experience successfully reform a vast national military? It’s within the realm of possibility, but no examples spring to mind. Both Casper Weinberger and Donald Rumsfeld had served in the military. Belousov could be the second coming of Henry L. Stimson, and it would still take him a minimum of 6-12 months to find all the levers he needed to actually reform the Russian military. And I would wager money that Belousov isn’t the second coming of Henry L. Stimson.
I think the most likely outcome of replacing Shoigu with Belousov will be a period where Russia switches from its current course of slow, grinding stupidity for a few months of much quicker and more disasterous stupidity.
Tags: Andrei Belousov, Foreign Policy, Military, Nikolai Patrushev, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Sergei Shoigu, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin
Shoigu have been Defense Minister for longer than 2 years. He’s been doing the whole war things for the last 2.5 years. He’s AFU’s greatest asset in Russia as he’s alleged to have stolen 30% of Russian defense budget.
He’ll be more like Robert STRANGE McNamara in his incompetency.
Belousov has a reputation as a miracle worker in transportation and distribution systems, especially railroads. T&D has been his career for the last 10 years. His successes in these fields got him sanctioned by the U.S. State Department on December 15, 2022.
Russian railways employ over 750,000 workers. They are the only goods transportation available between many locales in a huge, underdeveloped country like Russia .
Logistics are fundamental in industrial warfare, and become ever more important as a war expands and drags on. Russian railroad logistics during WW II were far superior to German railroad logistics and were one cornerstone of their ultimate victory. The Russians have typically entrusted economists with the management of their railroads and linked that management to their military at very high levels during times of war.
Putin spent a year ratcheting up war production to levels well beyond NATO’s. His appointment of Belousov clearly recognizes that logistics will be fundamental to delivering those goods to his warfighters.
Putin is laying the foundations for a very long, very costly war.
It is difficult to blame Sergei for the advice given to Vlad on starting the invasion of Ukraine, as he was simply one voice in the unified choir of advisors that was singing the “It Will Be Easy, Barely An Inconvenience” song to The Shirtless Tsar.
This includes their foreign intelligence folks, who were relaying their own assets reporting from inside foreign governments, including all of ours, who were singing exactly the same song to our leadership. Now, of course, the Russia desk has not been exactly the hot, most sought after assignment over our decades playing in various sandboxes, so while the best were brushing up their Pashtu, the rest were holding down the fort with their Russian Literature degrees. But there were still some old Cold War folks around, and they were talking up the 9 ft tall Formerly Red Army as well.
Roll forward to now and we have the return of Kremlinology albeit over telegram, reading the tea leaves of who is in what spot and trying to guess what it all means.
Short answer: No change until Vlad shuffles off this mortal coil, and likely not then unless he is kinetically assisted.
10x25mm,
Most of those 750,000 railroad workers have been pressed into military service to make up for the horrific losses the Russian military has suffered. Additionally, the ball bearings on Russian rolling stock has been wearing out and Russian industry has been unable to replace them quickly enough (if at all), nor has Russian industry been able to replace the barrel liners in their artillery tubes, so many tubes are going bananas.
Soviet logistics in WW2 was not just dependent on railroads, but on 6- and 8-axle trucks provided by … the US (so Soviet industry could focus on making tanks). As a result, by 1945, the Red Army was completely mechanized while the Wehrmacht was still at least half horse-drawn transport (even the Kriegsmarine; can you imagine those poor horses having to swim across the Skagerrak?). The Russians don’t have those trucks now. They’ve used up their own stock of trucks and have had to press civilian vehicles such as the Scooby-Doo vans into service. Russian logistics is still largely human-powered, while (as Trent Telenko has repeatedly pointed out) NATO’s is fully mechanized, which is being passed on to the Ukrainians. It will be interesting to see if he can turn this around, and if so how because sanctions have prevented Russia from addressing any of these issues, leaving them with buying only from North Korea and China, neither of which have a reputation for quality. Russia does not have a lot of options here.
Given the amount of known and documented corruption that Shoigu is connected to…? The fact that he’s not being strung up in a basement of the Lubyanka until he gives up his Swiss bank account details is telling.
Modern Russia is a mafia state; it’s fairly obvious that Shoigu has connections and is wired into things. What those things are, we cannot tell from the outside, but since he isn’t being called to account for what we do know about, and he’s basically been given another portfolio (after handling the military one ever so well…
You can tell a lot from that fact alone, and ain’t none of it good. The poor bastard they moved into his old job is likely the designated fall guy for whatever they see coming next, and I doubt that it’s anything good. The longer that Russia puts off the correctives for this idiotic war that Putin got them into, the worse the effects are going to be. They’ve already pissed away nearly 500,000 lives, most of their legacy hardware for the ground forces, and untold treasure. For what? A few miles of Ukrainian territory that they’re almost certain to lose when it all caves in? Plus, the damage done to their network of alliances in Central Asia…
And, let’s not forget revitalizing NATO. That alone was epic fail… Sweden and Finland into the alliance? WTF? I can’t see this ending well for Russia, no matter what happens. I suspect that the first thing to go when the next collapse happens is going to be Kaliningrad, nee Konigsberg. They’re going to be lucky if the area around St. Petersburg stays in the whatever rump Russian cluster-fuck remains… I’d lay you long odds that when push comes to shove, most of those folks are suddenly going to remember the days of yore when the Hanseatic League held sway in the Baltic, and yearn for those connections again. The rest of Russia is going to be a mess of secessions like you wouldn’t believe. I keep seeing interesting little details like how the Buryats are starting to notice how they’re suffering 75% higher casualties than ethnic Russians from the Moscow region… I don’t think that that sort of thing is sustainable. Either Putin is going to have to start forcing more capital region conscription, or he’s going to risk blowing up the Federation when the rest of the regions figure out they’re getting wiped out while ethnic Russians party in the capital.
The situation for the Russian Federation is amazingly similar to the one that Suzanne Collins laid out for her Hunger Games books. The capital region sucks in resources, and spits out death for all the other regions.
“Additionally, the ball bearings on Russian rolling stock has been wearing out and Russian industry has been unable to replace them quickly enough (if at all), nor has Russian industry been able to replace the barrel liners in their artillery tubes, so many tubes are going bananas.”
The Russian bearing industry (including their largest railway bearing manufacturer: EPK Saratov JSC) just obtained an extended anti-dumping duty on railroad bearings against the PRC from the Eurasian Economic Commission on April 1st. The anti-dumping duty rates are 31.3% of the customs value for Wuxi Rolling Bearings LLC and 41.5% for other manufacturers. This is not the action a government takes when supplies of a product are insufficient.
Russia has found PJSC Artillery Plant Number 9, located in Yekaterinburg, quite adequate to supply all the artillery & tank gun tubes that their forces are consuming. Should Artillery Plant Number 9’s output prove insufficient, they can reactivate the mothballed PJSC Motovilikha Artillery Plant in Perm. Each plant, individually, has a tube production capacity which exceeds all of NATO. They are fully integrated, all the way back to raw steel production.
The Russians really like artillery.
10X25mm,
You are assuming the Russians are rational and competent. Little of their conduct during this war suggests either. Granted, you don’t want to assume your enemy is irrational and incompetent, but for all we know Shoigu or some other oligarch is getting a big kickback on the Russian production of ball bearings, which would explain why they’d slap a duty on Chinese ball bearings. But just the fact that they are importing such a necessity for transportation and importing from a country with a reputation for shoddy goods (not as shoddy as the NoKos, but still pretty damn shoddy) suggests they are desperate for more ball bearings.
The Russians might love their artillery, but that does not mean they are good at it. They know how to drop a lot of shells relatively close to the target. They also know how to drop a lot of shells just trying to load them. (Remember the Red Army attack on the Oder in 1945 that opened with the largest artillery barrage of the war that somehow managed to miss almost all the Germans of Army Group Vistula.) There have been an awful lot of reports of Russian tubes going bananas, which is a bitch to repair, if it’s even possible. Then you get into the quality of the shells themselves, the quality of the steel the Russians are using (remember the T-34 in WW2 suffered from brittle steel), and the storage and transport of both. Russia’s reputation for quality control is even worse than Boeing’s.
This bears watching, to be sure, but it’s no reason to give up and let Russia win this war, and it’s no reason to stop aiding Ukraine.
“The Kremlin said that Shoigu, 66, would be replaced by former First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov, 65, a little-known politician who specializes in economic matters.”
Economics poses the question, “What are the costs?”
The Russians, given their dialectical materialistic DNA, are unable to calculate the cost to their society that comes from sacrificing conscripts to the meat grinder. Labor is the scarcest of all economic factors but Shoigu has treated manpower as an infinitely expendable resource.
From an economic standpoint, war is impoverishing. It requires consumer goods to be sacrificed to the war effort. The Guns and Butter production possibilities curve demonstrates this irrefutably.
By now, Putin must have recognized that Ukraine will be a costly venture. This attempt to rationalize war production by integrating the peace-time economy with the demands of the military/industrial complex is bound to fail.
There are far too few Russians who are sufficiently competent to manage the existing industrial capital stock. This responsibility was previously assigned to foreign industrial experts. Now, the industrial base that could be diverted into military use will prove to be a thin reed on which to lean.
Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic will not keep the ship afloat. Russia has vast natural resources but lacks the industrial base and technical expertise to exploit them for the purpose of waging a successful war.
The time to consult your economist is before the war starts. He would have pointed out the futility of fighting a Western proxy who could tap into NATO Wunderwaffe and their deep war chest.
“But just the fact that they are importing such a necessity for transportation and importing from a country with a reputation for shoddy goods (not as shoddy as the NoKos, but still pretty damn shoddy) suggests they are desperate for more ball bearings.”
Virtually all U.S. railroad bearings are imported from China. Germany imports 35% of their railroad bearings from China. Russia does not import a statistically significant portion of their railroad bearings from China; using domestic bearings exclusively for both new production and repairs.
“Remember the Red Army attack on the Oder in 1945 that opened with the largest artillery barrage of the war that somehow managed to miss almost all the Germans of Army Group Vistula.”
Think you are referring to the Battle of Seelow Heights. Generaloberst Gotthard Heinrici was a defensive genius. He was born in what is now Russian territory, amongst many Russians. Henrici spoke Russian fluently. He understood the Russians, especially Georgi Zhukov, as few western commanders did (or do). But he still lost.
The T-34 steel trope is false. Ilyich Research Laboratory’s MZ-2 steel was superior in projectile resistance to western steel alloy/heat treatment combinations well into the 1950’s. T-34 armor proved to be more than equal to every American anti-tank weapon in Korea, five years after WW II. The T-34’s major deficiency was the lack of a turret floor.
Vlad picks them like Trump, lickspittle all the way.
Lavrov today, Lavrov tomorrow, Lavrov forever!
“Virtually all U.S. railroad bearings are imported from China.”
This is like saying virtually all American SUVs are imported from Japan.
While it is true that US rolling stock uses Chinese bearings, these components are manufactured primarily in the American Midwest by US steelworkers, with a separate facility located in Canada.
The Chinese domestic bearing industry can make a good product but QC is spotty and you would not want to rely on this source for your war effort. In addition, economic sanctions will introduce uncertainty into the logistics chain, as will the continuing traffic snarl in the Suez Canal.
“[Russia is] using domestic bearings exclusively for both new production and repairs.“
Prior to the war, Russia imported roller bearings from Germany’s Siemens and
Sweden’s SKF. This was done to supplement domestic production either because the native product was too costly or of inferior quality. I suspect the latter. Using cheap Chinese crap to make up for the inferior quality of your own product is a nonstarter.
Rolling stock is essential to Russia’s economy which is now forced to go it alone. Putting all your eggs into one basket seems like a risky strategy but no credible alternative presents itself.
“Belousov has a reputation as a miracle worker in transportation and distribution systems, especially railroads.”
This is fortunate for Russia because it will require Heavenly intervention to bring about the necessary results. But as we all know, Russia is fighting for God in this war against the Satanic forces of NATO, so expecting otherworldly aid is not at all unreasonable for a man of Putin’s moral stature.
Methinks Sergei is fortunate that he’s still alive, and that is likely to be a temporary condition. He should stay away from places that have a high open view. And aircraft.
From 2014 to 2022, most U.S. railroad bearings were actually made by EPK Saratov JSC, which was in joint ventures with the two largest American RR bearing suppliers. The State Department imposition of sanctions on EPK Saratov forced those suppliers to turn to Chinese suppliers. There is one American factory making sliders in Nebraska, but this is an infinitesimal part of the U.S. railroad bearing market.
Canton-based Timken’s Industrial Motion division boasted sales of $367.0 million for fiscal year 2023. Industrial Motion produces the US made roller bearings used in rail cars. This represents about 1/3 of the industry’s US sales.
“Infinitesimal” seems like an inappropriate descriptor.
Timken joint ventured with EPK Saratov JSC in 2014. EPK were the source of Timken’s rail bearings in the U.S. until the 2022 sanctions. EPK had been supplying raw railroad bearing forgings to Timken for many years prior.
Alfromchgo said:
“Vlad picks them like Trump, lickspittle all the way.”
As opposed to Biden’s methodology of picking random idiots as advisers…?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13381631/Jared-Bernstein-Biden-economic-adviser-fails-explain-money-works.html
‘European Bearing Corporation (EPK) and Timken Sign Joint Venture Agreement’
https://www.bearing-news.com/european-bearing-corporation-epk-timken-sign-joint-venture-agreement/
From the article: “‘Together, we expect Timken and EPK will be able to provide unparalleled capabilities to industrial customers in Russia and the broader CIS region, which continue to be strategic markets for us.’”
Timken never relied on Russia to service the US rail industry.
Timken used their Russian partners as a conduit to increase export sales. When Timken abandoned the Russian market, domestic manufacturers were forced to pick up the slack, which promises to be daunting task.
You are not properly interpreting the corporate doublespeak here. Timken shipped their entire large industrial bearing finishing and assembly line to Saratov in late 2014. It had been idle for some time, because they were already buying their large rollers from EPK.
I think the war is proceeding splendidly from Putin’s point of view. NATO is now toothless and defanged and the entire world sees it cannot provide 1/10th of the materials and men that Russia puts into the operation and the longer it grinds on the less there is of Ukraine, NATO and western imperial power. The US has shown it is too inept, weak and incompetent to put in a simple LCAS which we used to be able to put up anywhere in PACFLT in less than 3 weeks.