Russian President Vladimir Putin fired Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Sunday, May 12 (May 22), as he began his fifth term as the country’s president.
According to Russian law, all members of the country’s cabinet resigned on Tuesday, when Putin began his fifth term in office after a lavish ceremony in the Kremlin.
Although the majority of cabinet members will resume their duties, the fate of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is not clear.
In a decree on Sunday, Putin appointed Mr. Shoigu as the secretary of the National Security Council and introduced the first deputy prime minister, Andrey Blosov, as the minister of defense.
Russia’s upper house must approve Mr. Blosov’s appointment.
Former ministers were nominated for the new cabinet to the Russian Federation Council on Sunday, but Mr Shoigu is the only former minister whose name was not on the list.
Sergei Shoigu’s deputy, Timur Ivanov, was arrested last month on bribery charges and will remain in police custody pending an official investigation.
Ivanov’s arrest was largely seen as an attack on Shoigu, and although Shoigu had close ties to Putin, he may have been removed from office for this reason.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Sunday that President Vladimir Putin has decided to give the former defense minister a job in the civilian sector because the ministry should be open to innovation and modern ideas.
Mr. Peskov also said that Blosov is the right person for the job.
President Putin also appointed former President Dmitry Medvedev to the Security Council. He has been the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council since 2020.
Observers say that Mr. Putin wants to hire his former friends and allies in the security war, who he wants to keep close to him.
This change happened at a sensitive time of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, when Russian forces are advancing in the east of Ukraine and have started extensive military operations in the northeastern regions of Ukraine.
Despite a series of military setbacks in the first year of Russia’s military operations in Ukraine, including the failure to capture the Ukrainian capital Kiev, and the withdrawal from Kharkiv and southern Kherson regions, Putin has yet to return to Shoigu. They were standing next to each other.
Putin supported Shoigu until Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner group, led a violent uprising last year that called for the defense minister (Shoigo) to be fired.
At the same time, British Defense Minister Grant Shapps said that during the Russian military invasion in Ukraine, the Russian forces led by Shwegar suffered more than 335,000 casualties.
He wrote in a message on his page X: “Russia needs a defense minister who can destroy this destructive legacy (Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine)” and end the war in Ukraine.
Shoigu, 68, was appointed Russia’s defense minister in 2012. He has been involved in Russian politics for decades after the collapse of the former Soviet Union. He was also one of Putin’s most trusted confidants before Russia launched its full-scale military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.