Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu may be the first casualty of Wagner’s failed insurrection over the weekend. A close ally of Vladimir Putin, of whom he is a personal friend, his political future is now in question.
Alexander Lukashenko’s mediation at the end of the conflict puts the military in an uncomfortable situation after Yevgueni Prigozhin accused him of being one of the reasons for his rebellion. At the moment, the Defense Minister has not appeared in public.
Putin and Shoigu have sunbathed together, topless, in Siberia. They have shared fishing trips and have played on the same ice hockey team. But this relationship began to go awry with Prigozhin’s public accusations against Valeri Gerasimov and Shoigu himself, whom he considers responsible for the death of “tens of thousands of Russians” in Ukraine, and for having “ceded territories to the enemy.”
Just before the rebellion broke out in Rostov-on-Don on June 12, Putin and Shoigu attended a medal ceremony at a military hospital. In the video of that act you can perfectly see how the president turns his back on the minister and shows apparent contempt.
The situation was embarrassing for a person who has had an unusually long political career in post-Soviet Russia. In fact, Shoigu’s presence at the heart of power predates Putin’s.
Originally from the Tuva region of southern Siberia, he is one of the rare non-ethnic Russians to have held a high-level government post after the collapse of the USSR.
Shoigu began his ascension in 1994 as minister for emergency situations in the early years of Boris Yeltsin. His travels across the country to handle plane crashes and earthquakes made him familiar to Russians and one of their most popular.
Shoigu served a dozen prime ministers in the same position until in 2012 he was appointed governor of the Moscow region and later defense minister. He was then appointed general, despite the lack of experience at a high level. He was tasked with modernizing the military and the man who oversaw Russia’s 2015 intervention in Syria.
But the disastrous campaign in the Ukraine, where the Russian army has shown all its weaknesses, may have been the beginning of the end of such a fruitful career.
