Report: Putin Benches Russian Defense Minister for Failures in Ukraine

The British Defense Ministry on Monday reported that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has been pushed to the sidelines of the Ukraine conflict by unhappy dictator Vladimir Putin. The report said operational commanders are bypassing Shoigu and communicating directly with the Kremlin.

“Russian officers and soldiers with first-hand experience of the war probably routinely ridicule Shoigu for his ineffectual and out-of-touch leadership as Russian progress has stalled,” the British intelligence report said.

“Shoigu has likely long struggled to overcome his reputation as lacking substantive military experience, as he spent most of his career in the construction sector and the Ministry of Emergency Situations,” the report noted.

Shoigu’s seemingly unlimited loyalty to Putin helped him become the longest-lasting minister of the Putin presidency and probably helped him win the post of Defense Minister without having any real military credentials.

The New York Post thought Putin might be unimpressed with Shoigu’s latest efforts to spin the progress of the Ukraine invasion:

On the six-month anniversary of the war last week, which coincided with Ukraine’s independence day, Shoigu contended that Russia had deliberately slowed the pace of its military campaign to minimize civilian casualties.

Speaking at a meeting of defense ministers as part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Shoigu said the Kremlin’s so-called military operation “is going according to a set plan” and promised that “all the objectives will be achieved.”

But Ukrainian defense intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov argued that the real reason for the slowdown was the invading soldiers’ “moral and physical fatigue” from the fighting, which by the latest Western estimates has claimed more than 47,000 casualties, along with thousands of pieces of costly military equipment.

U.K. intelligence was not impressed with Shoigu’s performance at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization either, characterizing his remarks as “deliberate misinformation,” including his contention that the invasion was only moving slowly because Russia was so eager to minimize casualties.

The British report noted that Putin has fired at least six of his generals since the invasion began, so Shoigu must still be in the president’s good graces if he gets benched quietly instead of sacked in public.

Shoigu disappeared for about two weeks after the invasion began, an absence attributed by observers to either serious health problems or Putin punishing him for a poor start to the “special military operation” in Ukraine.

The defense minister’s resilience might have finally been put to the ultimate test by the counter-offensive Ukraine launched on Monday against Kherson, a province the Russians captured early in the war. 

Shoigu’s office claimed the Ukrainian operation “failed miserably,” while advisers to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed Russia’s defenses collapsed in “just a few hours” in several key locations.

“We will push them to the border. To our border, the line of which has not changed. The invaders know it well,” Zelensky said in an energetic public address on Monday evening.

“If they want to survive, it is time for the Russian military to flee,” he said.

Zelensky adviser Oleksiy Arestovych curbed his boss’s enthusiasm a bit the following day, writing on the Telegram messaging platform that the objective in Kherson was a “slow operation to grind the enemy.”

“Of course, many would like a large-scale offensive with news about the capture by our military of a settlement in an hour, but we don’t fight like that,” Arestovych said. Various Ukrainian military sources claimed between one and four villages in Kherson were recaptured on the first day of the operation.