But the soldiers also know better than anyone else how disastrous the invasion is, and have just seen how easy it is to run a brigade or two up the M4 highway to Moscow.
They did not back the mutiny, and Markov insists the army remains devoted to fighting “neo-Nazis in Ukraine”. Putin typically appoints outsiders to such positions for exactly that reason, says Petrov. But the same is not true of the career officers.Īs Sergey Markov, a Russian political analyst close to the Kremlin acknowledged this week, there are a great many Russian soldiers who share Prigozhin’s disgust with the high command. Even before the Ukraine war exposed his incompetence, few of Russia’s 1.15 million soldiers, sailors and airmen would have been devoted enough to follow him in a bid for power. Shoigu’s greatest weakness is that he is not a soldier.
“The whole clan that backed and surrounded him is gone,” says Nikolai Petrov, a veteran observer of Russian domestic politics currently with SWP, a German foreign policy think tank. But his chances of acting independently against the boss today are slim. If Shoigu is still in post, he will have a seat at the table when the elite try to work out what to do after Putin dies. “It is horrible statesmanship, but it is a reasonable way of securing yourself if you are worried about internal threats.” “Having an incompetent minister of defence is a feature, not a bug,” says Gabuev. One reason may be that tactical blunders on the battlefield may not necessarily be political blunders in the Kremlin. That suits Putin, whose model of government requires underlings take the blame for anything that goes wrong.īut Shoigu’s victory in the power struggle with Prigozhin is proof that his political skills remain sharp, and that he retains access to Putin, the real currency of power in contemporary Russia. For months, Shoigu has been viciously attacked not only by Prigozhin, but by a vast network of “patriotic” ultra-nationalist and pro-war bloggers who blame him for the needless deaths of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers.
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