Commanders of Putin's Long War: Purged, Reshuffled and Disgruntled
The trend of reshuffling the Russian top military command in the course of a fast-evolving and far from successful war has progressed unevenly both across the Armed Forces’ structures and in time. The rationale for and timing of the abrupt cadre decisions made by Commander-in-Chief Putin often defy logical explanation, and the rare official clarifications are no more informative than the usual information blackout.
Putin typically prioritizes loyalty over competence, which makes the command structure incapable of addressing sudden shifts in the combat environment. The recent profound shake-up of and purges in the Defense Ministry have resulted in a serious bureaucratic disorganization of this structure that is crucial for sustaining the war effort. The lack of any changes in the General Staff weakens the ability to learn from experience and compromises the authority of the high command. Angst and anger among the fighting generals caused by the ineptness of the high command is a major source of political risk, which Putin can neither ignore nor properly address.
Dr. Pavel K. Baev is an Associate Research Fellow at Ifri’s Russia/Eurasia Center, a Researcher and Professor at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution. After graduating from Moscow State University (MA in Political Geography, 1979), he worked in a research institute of the USSR Ministry of Defense, received a PhD in International Relations from the Institute for US and Canadian Studies, USSR Academy of Sciences (1988), and then worked for the Institute of Europe, Moscow. He joined PRIO in October 1992. He writes a weekly column for the Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasia Daily Monitor.
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Commanders of Putin's Long War: Purged, Reshuffled and Disgruntled
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