RIGA, Latvia — Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu faced intensifying political pressure Thursday over a series of disorderly military retreats, as Russian state television anchors openly attacked the military command for Ukraine’s success in regaining territory in areas President Vladimir claims to have annexed.
As his troops retreat, Russian defense chief comes under fire at home
The city is not occupied by Russia, and the Kremlin has vowed to conquer parts of the allegedly annexed regions that it does not control. But in the days since Putin declared the seizure of the Ukrainian territories, in flagrant violation of international law, Russian troops have been retreating on two fronts — in Donetsk and Luhansk to the east, and in Mykolaiv and Kherson to the south.
The growing, strident criticism of the Russian military command is driven by Russian hard-line nationalists, some of whom have long borne a grudge against Shoigu, including Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner mercenary group, and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, each of whom have their own loyal military forces fighting on the ground in Ukraine.
The calls for Shoigu’s dismissal telegraph his increasing vulnerability after a series of humiliating military failures in recent weeks, including Russia’s loss over the weekend of Lyman, a strategic transit hub in Donetsk, and its surrender last month of nearly all the territory in the northeast Kharkiv region that Russian forces had occupied for many months.
The criticism also signals the mounting domestic political problem that the military setbacks, and a botched plan to mobilize thousands of new troops, now pose for Putin. Shoigu, 67, has served as defense minister for nearly a decade, but has been part of Putin’s leadership team since Putin was elevated to the presidency on Dec. 31, 1999. Until the war, Shoigu was often tipped as a potential Putin successor.
Shoigu has no military background, but he is one of Russia’s longest serving ministers, going back to 1991, when President Boris Yeltsin named him minister for emergency situations, allowing him to build a high profile. One of Russia’s most popular politicians, according to prewar opinion polling, Shoigu is a close ally of Putin sometimes accompanying the president on trips to the Siberian taiga.
The rowdy public attacks have shattered the prohibition on criticizing the Russian military leadership seen earlier in the war, and underscore the rivalry and poor coordination between Russia’s disparate forces on the battlefield, where the operations of Prigozhin’s mercenary force have at times appeared to be at odds with the strategy and objectives of the traditional Russian military, according to analysts.
Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Moscow proxy administration in Kherson, said on Thursday that Shoigu’s performance was so poor that any real officer would shoot himself.
“Indeed many people say that if they were the Minister of Defense, who brought things to this state of affairs, they would shoot themselves, if they were real officers,” Stremousov said, speaking on a video he took of himself and posted on Telegram. “But the word officer is incomprehensible to many.”
Fueling the criticisms, a series of videos circulating on pro-Kremlin telegram channels Thursday showed a group of several hundred Russian soldiers whose leaders complained that after being mobilized recently, they were kept in “cattle conditions,” forced to buy their own food and issued old, rusted weapons.
One soldier in the group had earlier posted a video saying that his unit was told they would soon be sent to fight in Ukraine without training. Another waved a thermometer at the camera, shouting that many of the recruits were sick with fevers.
Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti reported Thursday that the unit of 299 soldiers would be sent for training in Mulino, Russia, quoting an official in the Western Military District, comments that appeared to confirm that the men in the videos were indeed mobilized soldiers. But other reports suggested that the videos could be a staged effort by Shoigu’s rivals to discredit the defense minister.
Artem Kovrignykh, 20, a former McDonald’s employee and mobilized soldier who recorded one of the videos near Belgorod in southern Russia, told independent media ASTRA that a Russian colonel lined the group up on Wednesday and told them that they would be sent to Ukraine the next day. He and others spent 90 minutes trying to convince the officer not to send the men, finally declaring that they all refused to go to Ukraine without training.
Kovrignykh said he recorded the video on Wednesday immediately after this and posted it online. It caused a major public outcry. After the controversy, military officials put the men on a train and sent them to a training center, he added.
“We came to Belgorod region where the training was supposed to take place. But instead of training, we were trying to survive,” he said. “We put up our own tents and found our own food. At first we tried to discuss this with our officers But no one listened to us. We got no answer.”
In the argument with the colonel, he said: “We explained that our soldiers weren’t ready. We had no uniforms. I have a helmet and flak jacket. My soldiers didn’t. I couldn’t send them off like that. Then, how would I explain to their mothers why they died?”
Kovrignykh said the most of the men were issued a summer uniform, a bag, a mug, a spoon and a small thermos. “That’s all. No dry rations, bulletproof vests, helmets, or flasks. The uniforms were mostly the wrong size. So were the boots. The guns jam after every reload. These are weapons from the ’70s and ’80s.”
The video spread widely on social media after it was posted by a pro-Kremlin military blogger, Rybar, who has more than 900,000 subscribers.
One hard-line military blogger, former FSB officer Igor Girkin, who runs a Telegram channel that has repeatedly called for harsher military action against Ukraine, criticized the chief of the Russian General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, and predicted that Shoigu would be dismissed.
The open attacks on the military in state media mean that the Ministry of Defense leadership “will finally answer for much of what it did (or rather did not do) before and during the war,” Girkin said.
“And that means someone will be demolished. And someone big,” Girkin added, referring directly to Shoigu.
As Russia loses ground in its supposedly annexed territories, the Kremlin is trying to cement its political hold by forging ahead with administrative measures to absorb the regions.
Andrei Turchak, head of Putin’s United Russia party, announced Thursday that the party had opened branches in the illegally annexed regions, as authorities pressed ahead with other absorption measures, including issuing car registration plate codes for the four regions.
Those steps were taken despite new economic sanctions agreed upon by the European Union on Wednesday to punish Russia over the illegal territorial seizures.
The sanctions include bans on imports of Russian steel, precious metals and precious stones, further bans on exports of tech products to Russia, including products used in aviation, and an oil price cap for Russian seaborne crude deliveries to third countries.
Putin, speaking at the start of a meeting of senior Russian government officials on economic issues, acknowledged Thursday that some sectors of the Russian economy, particularly those reliant on exports in Europe, were under severe pressure because of sanctions.
“In turn, our exporters switch to other markets,” he said. “But this process, of course, is not fast. It takes time to build new cooperative and logistics chains.” Putin said that European countries that shunned Russian goods were forced to pay higher prices elsewhere as a result.
Putin claimed that Russian industrial production was “gradually recovering” in some of the industries hardest hit by sanctions, such as automobile production. But data show consumer demand was low and September retail sales were weak.
The pressure on Shoigu comes after a series of Russian military commanders have been quietly dismissed from their posts, including Dmitry Bulgakov, a deputy defense minister, who was replaced last week by Mikhail Mizintsev, who led Russia’s brutal assault on Mariupol.
Additionally, the commander of the troubled Western Military Command, Alexander Zhuravlev, was last week replaced by Roman Berdnikov. Rumors about Zhuravlev’s dismissal had been circulating since June.
Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report.
Source: WP
