Putin Wants To Pause The War In Ukraine While He Purges His Generals
He will not get what he wants
The Kremlin has apparently floated a ceasefire on present battle lines in Ukraine. Channels are abuzz with speculation. Call me crazy, but this may not be entirely a joke. Vladimir Putin has a problem. He cannot both purge his generals and prosecute a war at the same time. Stalin at least had the sense to do his purges first.
A purge is clearly underway in Russia. It started in April when the deputy defense minister, a Shoigu crony named Timur Ivanof, was arrested and summarily dismised from service on corruption charges. Riding high on his stage-managed reelection, Putin then shuffled his cabinet after reinauguration, sidelining Sergei Shoigu from his defense minister role and replacing him with a Soviet-trained economist, Andrei Belousev.
The day after Shoigu’s demotion, Lt. Gen. Yury Kuznetsov, “chief of the Defense Ministry’s main personnel directorate” was arrested “on charges of bribery and jailed pending an investigation and trial.”
Kuznetsov is accused of accepting an “exceptionally large bribe,” a charge punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The committee alleged he received the bribe in his previous post as head of the military General Staff’s directorate in charge of preserving state secrets, a position he held for 13 years.
In the raid, agents of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, broke down the doors and windows of his home while he was asleep, the reports said, seizing gold coins, luxury items and over 100 million rubles (just over $1 million) in cash.
Two days later, Major General Ivan Popov, the popular former commander of the 58th Combined Arms Army, was arrested and charged with theft of sheet metal used in the construction of defenses in southern Ukraine. Putin likely saw Popov as a political threat.
Deputy head of the Russian General Staff Lt. Gen. Vadim Shamarin was arrested this week and also charged with receiving an exceptionally large bribe. Of particular interest to this writer, “Shamarin is accused of taking bribes between 2016 and 2023 from a factory in the Ural mountains that produces communications equipment, as a reward for placing bigger state contracts with it, Russia's Investigative Committee said. It said he had benefited to the tune of at least 36 million roubles ($400,000).”
Vladimir Verteletzky, “a senior procurement official at the defence ministry,” was arrested the same day. A handful of subscribers may recall that when I started analyzing the Russian failure in Ukraine on Day Eight, I listed the lack of modern secure military communications equipment at Number Two in my Top Ten defeat factors. Lack of competent commanders was Item Three.
In addition to these five arrests, the Commander of the 20th Army, Sukhrob Ahmedov, was forcibly retired. He had been criticized for “meat grinder” tactics. Finally, “the deputy head of the federal prison service for the Moscow region, Vladimir Telayev, also was arrested Thursday on charges of large-scale bribery,” Reuters reports. Expect the crackdown to continue.
What if Belousev has taken accounts and inventory and told Putin the macroeconomic truth? What if that was the point of putting him in the role?
Open source imagery analysts estimate that Russian generals have burned through more tanks and guns and planes than the Russian state can replace from its factories; huge prewar stockpiles are still finite; no slack is left in the labor force to increase production, and Russia still lacks a domestic tax base. Dependency on fossil fuel exports has become a strategic liability. As there are only three ways to pay for war — debt, inflation, and taxes — Belousev’s biggest challenge will be squeezing the rubles out of Russia. What if Putin is actually just now finding out how bad things really are?
Reuters talked to five sources who told them that “Putin, re-elected in March for a new six-year term, would rather use Russia's current momentum to put the war behind him.” Furthermore, “two of the sources said Putin was of the view that gains in the war so far were enough to sell a victory to the Russian people.” Freezing the conflict on current battle lines might even make this tenable.
Returning to cold war and gray zone provocations, such as unilaterally deciding to redraw international boundaries at sea, rather than ‘kinetic’ warfare, would give Putin time to finish purging his generals in peace. Putin is threatened by competence, most of all in his military men. He has elevated the FSB’s military counterintelligence division over the Ministry of Defense.
“Ostensibly an effort to stamp out military corruption, the Federal Security Service (FSB) is going after high-ranking generals in hopes of pinning the blame for the botched 2022 invasion of Ukraine on the military’s top brass and taking control of the distribution of the army’s vast budget — all with the Kremlin’s tacit approval,” the Moscow Times reports.
Reuters’s sources frame Putin’s thinking about a ceasefire within a threat to keep making war forever unless Kyiv and the West do what he wants. This would of course be yet another bluff by Putin the gambler. He does not want to go through another round of mobilization if he can avoid it; he would like a pause, if he could get one, to re-arm and rebuild. But Vladimir Putin is not serious about actual peace and no one should take his ceasefire offer seriously.
At best, it will serve as propaganda fodder for Russiaboos and tankies and others trying to divide the West. But the timing may be a sign that something is fresh on his mind.