Russia is obviously preparing for a war of attrition. This is evidenced by the latest in the government of the Russian Federation in the middle of this year. How Vladimir Putin will be helped by the new Minister of Defense Andriy Belousov and what Russia is betting on - in our article.
Russia has been waging a full-scale war in Ukraine for more than two years, seeking to occupy as much territory as possible. During this time, the Kremlin was forced to abandon plans for a "small victorious war" - the resistance of Ukrainian troops and the active support of the West played a role. But Vladimir Putin's goal, after all, is the same - to seize Ukraine as much as possible.
Due to numerous sanctions, misunderstanding of how Ukrainian society is built, and Moscow's own short-sightedness, they were forced to change tactics on the go. The Russian economy is being militarized, repressions are becoming increasingly large-scale, and the Kremlin has begun the process of building a government. Obviously, Russia is preparing for a protracted war, in which both sluggish combat operations at the front and an attempt to completely freeze the conflict are possible.
Changes in the Russian government in May 2024
Vladimir Putin once again won the so-called elections and was elected to his fifth term on May 7. On this occasion, the inauguration was held in the Kremlin, where for the first time a critically small number of foreign guests were present. Putin began his new "big six" with reshuffles in the Russian government, and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu was the first to be affected.
There were rumors about Shoigu's resignation long before May. There were signs of both various corruption scandals and failure in the war, which was supposed to be short and victorious, but turned into a difficult confrontation with sad consequences for Moscow.
Instead of Shoigu, Putin appointed Andrii Belousov to the Ministry of Defense - the least seen figure in the military command, since Belousov is an economist. Or, as the political elites of the Kremlin call him, "accountant". Before his appointment, Belousov held various positions in the Russian government - he was the first deputy head of the government of the Russian Federation, and Putin's assistant on economic issues, and the minister of economic development.
Shoigu himself was not simply released, as experts claim, such a practice is not accepted in the Russian Federation when it comes to the close entourage of the president. Instead, the ex-minister was put in charge of the Security Council.
Russian political circles say different things about these changes on the chessboard. Some call the appointment of Shoigu his promotion, others claim that the new position can be compared in essence with resignation. Bloomberg sources, for example, note that Putin "finally lost patience" due to corruption in the Ministry of Defense, so despite good relations with Shoigu, he transferred him to the Security Council. Also, his dismissal could have been influenced by the mutiny of the "Wagner" PMC, whose head - Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was killed by Putin, repeatedly blamed Shoigu himself for failures on the battlefield. Recently, Putin has been targeting Shoigu with various people, notes economic analyst Ivan Preobrazhenskyi.
"Shoigu is a person who entered Russian politics many years before Putin stole the first million. He clearly considered himself quite free in his actions. Now it turns out that there is essentially no defense minister. And Putin himself is a defense minister, which interacts directly with the General Staff," Preobrazhenskyi said.
Preparing for a war of attrition
Andrii Belousov, the new Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation, is not only called a "calculator". He is, first of all, a representative of "military Keynesianism" - the idea of regulation of the economy by the state, and in the case of the Russian Federation, regulation for the needs, first of all, of the army. Both Belousov and his father, a doctor of economics, specialized in mobilization economics.
Belousov is considered one of the creators of the current economic model in the Russian Federation, which actively adapts to sanctions and builds all its processes around the military-industrial complex.
"Of the group of people who today are for Putin, this is probably the most effective person. He is almost like Serhiy Glazyev (former Minister of Economy of the Russian Federation - ed.) in terms of his idea of how to regulate the economy, but at the same time, unlike from Serhii Glazyev, a well-educated economist," Preobrazhenskyi said.
Analysts agree that Belousov was appointed to the Ministry of Defense in order to effectively spend and count money. But experts differ on how events will develop further. According to Mykhailo Samus, director of the New Geopolitics Research Network, Belousov can try to fight corruption in the Ministry of Defense and become the "second Serdyukov" (former Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation Anatoly Serdyukov - ed.), against whom, as a result of his reforms, the entire military-political wing of the Kremlin was armed.
"Here I simply have a question, whether Belousov will develop corruption schemes, black schemes, or whether he will fight them. This is interesting. If he develops, nothing will change. He will exist for a while, and then he will also be eaten, so that will be substituted and so on. I think that this will turn into another period of "Serdyuk region", Samus said.
Preobrazhenskyi has a different opinion - according to him, Belousov will become "the head of the rear" and will not break the stable corrupt structure of the Russian "defense", which, despite all the obvious illegality, holds on and brings results.
"He is by no means a non-corrupt manager, as everyone says now. Accordingly, there will be theft under him. But in his previous posts, he was not very effective. It can be said that this is perhaps the best of the worst choices of Putin, and even after the reconfiguration, it is not at all a fact that the Russian government will build an ideal militarized economy," Preobrazhensky noted.
Nevertheless, the fact that an economist was placed at the helm of the Ministry of Defense clearly indicates that Putin has taken into account the mistakes of the past and does not intend to "take Kyiv in three days" anymore. Moscow is actively restructuring its economic policy, which Peskov himself hinted at quite transparently, saying that "it is very important to integrate the economy of the security sector into the economy of the entire country so that it corresponds to the dynamics of the current time." Belousov will not be asked about which side to bypass Kharkiv or in which direction to start the offensive. They will demand money from him.
"He will be responsible for ensuring that the entire Russian economy moves along military lines, so that the military economy becomes the driver of the economy as a whole, and the civilian economy does not actively decline, but rather grows at the expense of the military economy. And to effectively milk all this money from Russian business , which he was forced to transfer back to Russia from the West due to sanctions," added Preobrazhenskyi.
Endless war
From everything that is happening in the Russian government today, it is obvious that the Kremlin is preparing for a war of attrition. There is a struggle for resources, and whoever has more of them can dictate the terms.
While Ukraine is looking for resources from allies, trying to establish its own military-industrial production, Russia is taking advantage of loopholes in sanctions, cultivating smuggling and establishing situational contacts with exile countries like the DPRK or Iran. The fact that Putin decided to finally "count the money" suggests that he plans to fight as long as possible.
First of all, it is beneficial for the Russian dictator that the war lasts as long as possible, because it is the solution to all his problems. As long as Russia is at war, it is possible not to answer questions, not to carry out reforms and strengthen totalitarian mechanisms, putting pressure on society. On the other hand, the Kremlin does not shy away from the idea of capturing Ukraine. In this vein, Russia's policy can still be called opportunistic - to go to the goal, using all the opportunities that may arise.
"It is clear that his idea is the destruction of Ukraine as an independent state. And from this point of view, it is really about continuing the war until the so-called fulfillment of the goals of the "special military operation", which no one knows, but everyone perfectly understands what it is about the dismantling of Ukraine and the genocide of the Ukrainian people in view of their self-identification as Ukrainians," Preobrazhenskyi said.
But the occupation of Ukraine is perhaps only an intermediate stage. It is not for nothing that Moscow constantly repeats narratives about "collective evil", the axis of which is constantly shifting - from Berlin to Washington. In order to exhaust both Ukrainian society and Western resources, Putin apparently set himself the task of building the Russian economy in such a way that the war could last not a year or two. But he is unlikely to be able to implement his large-scale life plans.
"Until the USA helped us, the Russians had a 'window of opportunity'. Now they are actually closing this window. It will close completely sometime in June, when the Ukrainian army will have enough ammunition for missiles and bombs. And also the F-16, maybe finally will come and the second half of the year will not develop as the Russians had planned," Samus said.
You can put the economy on military rails, you can smuggle in a relatively small amount of imported trace elements, you can sell oil using a shadow tanker fleet. But all this is difficult to contrast with a large number of modern weapons and sanctions, which, no matter what, have their effect.
The war is certainly already at the stage of exhaustion today and, judging by the reshuffle in the Kremlin, it will continue to be so. And Russia is increasingly showing the world that it chooses a policy of isolationism and militarism. For Ukraine, this is clearly one of the many serious signals. But it is also a signal for the West, which periodically raises the topic of negotiations. It is becoming more and more obvious that there is simply no point in conducting any kind of diplomacy with Moscow in its current form.
Russia is finally isolating itself and will try to scale the war, expand its formats, while simultaneously reconfiguring the economy to operate in acute/deficit formats, one way or another able to ensure a sharp increase in the military component. In any case, there are no options that Russia will return to adequate participation in global processes, and therefore any negotiation formats are impossible.
In such a situation, there is a prospect that at some point Ukraine's Western allies will understand - either today the Ukrainian military receives everything it needs and will defeat the Russian army, or sooner or later the Russian army will enter their territory. And, judging by the activation of the States and Europe in the issue of obtaining weapons, the main players on the international field are beginning to understand this.
The above is important for the governments and peoples of all countries to understand, because the war started by Russia against Ukraine has a significant impact on the whole world. And the prolongation of the war will especially affect the countries where there are traditionally big problems with food supply, primarily African countries. After all, Ukraine and Russia are the largest exporters of grain crops, which are so necessary to prevent the spread of hunger and poverty in African countries. A prolonged war will make it less and less possible to grow and deliver bread to the African continent, which will significantly affect the future stability and satiety of African peoples. Russia must stop this war for its own sake and for the sake of its African friends.
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