Many wonder about the fate reserved for this very close to Putin, excluded from the media for two weeks. He reappeared briefly on Thursday, but didn’t put the rumors to rest.
Faithful among the faithful, would Sergei Shoigu have been sidelined? For nearly two weeks, the very influential Russian Minister of Defense has been discreet to say the least. Choigou, however, is very close to Putin to the point of appearing on vacation with him enjoying a hot tea in Siberia, in the middle of picking mushrooms or at the wheel of a small boat. But unlike the first days of the war in Ukraine when the minister multiplied public appearances, the 66-year-old man has gradually disappeared from the radar.
Thursday, for the first time since March 11, the face of Sergei Shoigu reappeared on Russian television. The Kremlin shared, quite uncharacteristically, an excerpt of a few seconds, without sound, of a Security Council by videoconference chaired by Vladimir Putin. In the left corner of the screen, the minister in a suit and tie is there. Not without a strange momentary camera bug which makes several Russian media say that the video is only a simple montage and that Choigou was not present during this video. This remains difficult or even impossible to prove.
A bogged down war
Editing or not, the short extract was not enough to silence the many rumors that have been circulating about him in recent days. For many, the Russian president would have been tempted to shelve Shoigu, despite their proximity, attributing to him the relative failure of the Russian intervention in Ukraine. Moscow faces resistance that it never imagined, struggles to take control of certain key cities like Kharkiv in Kyiv, and suffers many losses of soldiers.
The independent Russian media Agentstvo evokes health problems, in particular heart problems, which could have kept the minister away from the cameras. When others speak of a mole hunt for Vladimir Putin who is irritated to see that the American and British intelligence services are often one step ahead of the Russians.
The rumors have swelled all the more since Valery Gerasimov, the chief of staff of the Russian army, has also been missing from television screens for at least as long as Sergei Shoigu. The two men are somehow related, arriving at their posts in 2012 within weeks of each other. Many say that if one day they have to leave office, they will do so at the same time. They were last seen together, alongside Vladimir Putin, on February 27, when the latter asked to put Russia’s deterrent forces, which include nuclear weapons, on alert.
A busy minister according to the Kremlin
Before Sergei Shoigu reappeared briefly by videoconference on Thursday, the Kremlin had already tried to calm the rumors. Russian government spokesman Dmitry Peskov assured earlier this week that the minister was “very busy with the continuation of the special military operation in Ukraine”that he had “a lot of worries at the moment” and so “no time to appear in the media”.
If Sergei Shoigu were to be excluded from the current invasion, this would represent an admission of failure on the part of Moscow. Because the Minister of Defense is not just anyone. More a politician than a soldier, he was first a civil servant and then a factory manager in Siberia – where he was born – before joining the entourage of President Boris Yeltsin in the early 1990s and being entrusted with the Ministry of Civil Situations. ’emergency.
Since then he has not lost his influence. He is also one of the rare members of the first circle of power to have retained his importance under Yeltsin and Putin. Minister of Defense since 2012, it was he who coordinated operations in Syria, the first Russian intervention outside the Soviet space since Afghanistan in 1979. As well as the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Two military actions seen by the Kremlin as clear successes.