Is Putin going to sack Shoigu?

I don't know but Russian commentators seem to think so

photo credit: kremlin.ru

The arrest of Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, who is accused of accepting a large bribe, has sparked a great deal of speculation on the Russian Internet. And with good reason.

Ivanov is Shoigu’s man. He served as deputy governor during Shoigu’s brief stint as head of Moscow Oblast before following his patron to the Defense Ministry. (If you’re looking for more background info on Ivanov, Rurik has a fun writeup.)

Also, everyone knew that Timur had been embezzling gazillions of rubles and pocketing gargantuan bribes for a long time. So why cuff him now, just a few weeks before Putin will pick a new cabinet?

It is these two things—the fact that Ivanov is part of Team Shoigu, and the timing of his arrest—which suggest that Ivanov might not be the only high-ranking official to get the boot. This is what patriotic, pro-SMO Russian media outlets are saying, at least.

Here’s a comment from a political scientist published by Nakanune:

It is clear that the official wording of the charge—a bribe of a million rubles—is only the beginning of the process, other charges will be added. Ivanov’s case had been in the works for a long time, the dossier was plump, the president personally issued the order for the arrest warrant and, probably, it is no coincidence that this happened right now, because after May 7, after the inauguration of the president, nominations for the main positions will be made—and this, of course, a signal that our Department of Defense may be about to change.

We need to look at the appointments that will be made; the whole logic of the process suggests that our Minister of Defense may also change.

Katyusha thinks there is a chance that Shoigu may not be the only one to lose his job:

Part of the Russian nomenklatura, as in the days of Prigozhin’s raid on Moscow, perceives Ivanov’s arrest as an explosion of a deep-sea bomb, which is fraught with a tsunami of resignations and revelations. And among the connections of the arrested person, they name not only Deputy Defense Minister Tsalikov and Shoigu himself, but also Deputy Prime Minister Siluanov and Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov. Coming from the same team is the country’s chief digital scientist, Maksud Shadayev, who this week announced a new amount of his claims for the digitization of everything—1.6 trillion rubles, and continues to do his best to “put out the fire with kerosene”, pushing for the widespread use of biometrics. To understand the motivation of such people, or rather, the degree of their digital madness, it is enough to familiarize yourself with their statements.

Katyusha ends its article by observing that the Space Lizard Agenda is alive and well in Russia, and warning that Ivanov may have been thrown under the bus in an attempt to pacify patriotic Right-of-the-Kremlin circles in Russia. But in the end, nothing will really change.

I don’t know. We’ll see.

But the mere suggestion that Shoigu could be canned is of course deeply disturbing to disaffected Westerners who abuse themselves by listening to Very Serious Pundits and their 5D Bingo sermons. After all, why would Putin want to fire Shoigu, the inventor of the brilliant military strategy, “sit in a trench and wait for a drone to kill you as Gazprom pays Kiev to transit its tasty Russian gas to Europe”? Moscow is about to introduce the gold-backed ruble and vaporize Bill Gates with fifteen S-700 surface-to-space-lizard missiles—why sack Shoigu when everything is going according to plan? Why would patriotic pro-SMO Russian commentators suggest something so outlandish and offensive?

I don’t know. I’m just telling you what people are saying here in Russia.

And playing with puppies.

Everything else is futile.

The puppies are trying to embezzle my boots