(Courtesy PUCK–Julia Joffe)

Putin’s Kharkiv Head Fake & Cabinet Kremlinology

Notes on Putin’s game theory for pressuring Kharkiv and the real reasons behind his wartime cabinet reshuffle.

Russian troops are advancing quickly in part because they haven’t yet reached Ukraine’s main defensive lines, but also because the offensive comes after key problems have been allowed to fester on the Ukrainian side. Photo: Contributor/Getty Images

JULIA IOFFE

May 14, 2024

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In the last few days, Russian troops have launched an offensive in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, advancing around 5 kilometers and seizing a few border villages along the way. None of this is surprising: Ukrainian forces have been shelling the neighboring Russian region of Belgorod for months, and Russian officials have been openly discussing creating a buffer zone to protect the territory and its residents. Troops have been massing on the Russian side for weeks. The only thing left was for Vladimir Putin to approve the order to move in. 

The Kharkiv offensive is likely designed to achieve two parallel political and tactical goals. “Moving the border a few kilometers is not necessarily going to prevent Ukraine from launching drones and missiles at Belgorod,” noted the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Michael Kofman. “When they’re discussing a buffer zone, what they are attempting to do is shift the line so that they can threaten Kharkiv and force a partial evacuation, which would prove politically significant.” Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second-largest city and, until the war, was primarily Russian-speaking. “It’s not the Russians’ intention to take Kharkiv, nor do they have the forces for it,” Kofman explained. “The point is to draw Ukrainian forces to its defense, fix their reserves there, potentially weakening the front line in Donetsk for a Russian attack.”

Russian troops are advancing quickly in part because they haven’t yet reached Ukraine’s main defensive lines, but also because the offensive comes after key problems have been allowed to fester on the Ukrainian side, both in Washington and in Kyiv. In Washington, it took seven months to finally approve critical military aid for Ukraine, during which Ukrainian forces steadily ran out of ammunition, both to shoot back at the enemy and to intercept the drones and missiles attacking its cities and civilian infrastructure. 

But, as I’ve written before, Kyiv’s problems aren’t all Washington’s fault. Volodymyr Zelensky dawdled on the politically sensitive question of expanding the military draft, allowing the Ukrainian military’s manpower shortage to grow acute. Now that the draft law has finally been signed and implemented (just this month), it will take many more months to find these new soldiers, equip and train them, and get them to the battlefield. In the meantime, Ukraine is uniquely vulnerable, and it had long been expected that Moscow would take advantage of this window to launch a new offensive. “The Russian military can see what everybody else sees: Ukraine has a deficit of manpower and reserves to cover the front,” Kofman explained. “Their goal is to create a dilemma whereby the Ukrainian military cannot reinforce the defense of Kharkiv without weakening the front line elsewhere.”

There is some hope in the West that Ukraine might be saved now that American aid is flowing again. But, as Kofman told me, “the supplemental is not talismanic.” It hasn’t helped with manpower—nor was it supposed to. It doesn’t help with the building of fortifications—and it wasn’t supposed to do that either. And it certainly can’t do anything to help Ukraine address the systemic problems within its own military, like poor communication, training, cohesiveness, and the unwillingness to report bad news up the chain of command. The supplemental, Kofman said, “will help Ukraine avoid the worst-case scenario this year, but things are likely to get worse before they get better.”

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Kremlin Musical Chairs

By law, a Russian president must form a new government after his inauguration. By custom, since Russian law is a hazy concept, the Russian president—who, for the last two decades, has almost always been Putin—has used the opportunity to reshuffle his friends and allies among the various ministerial positions. It’s a game of musical chairs in which demotions are masked as lateral moves, and in which a simulacrum of change at the top is used to paper over the fact that there is only a finite number of people Putin trusts with the ship of state. 

And because loyalty is, for Putin, the key qualification for government service, he has a hard time getting rid of anyone for incompetence. Such people are not fired but simply moved to another powerful (and lucrative) position, where he can continue to keep an eye on them. 

This is why Putin removed Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu from his post on Sunday and scooted him over to the National Security Council. Under Shoigu’s leadership, the Russian army failed to execute Putin’s harebrained scheme to take Kyiv in 72 hours—or in the ensuing two-plus years. The amount of corruption and theft in the Russian military meant recruits were poorly equipped after Russia began its “partial mobilization” in September 2022—remember the video of a commander telling the men to stock up on their wives’ tampons because they’re handy in treating bullet wounds? Ammunition was often in short supply. Who can forget the late Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rants at Shoigu, asking him, crudely, where the artillery shells were?

Prigozhin then led a march on Moscow to demand the defense minister’s ouster. Putin, with the help of Aleksandr Lukashenko, defused the immediate crisis, then killed Prigozhin two months to the day he began his anti-Shoigu mutiny. But despite the allegations of corruption and ineffectiveness, Putin left Shoigu in place. After all, Shoigu was a good friend—the two often vacation and partake in shamanistic rituals together—and a loyal servant. 

But then, last month, several ultra-high-ranking military officials were arrested for corruption and for taking eye-popping bribes. One of them, Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, was a close associate of Shoigu’s. The noose was clearly tightening, and now, eleven months after Prigozhin called for his firing, Shoigu is finally out, replaced with economist Andrei Belousov, who will work as the head beancounter at M.O.D., making sure the generals and the bureaucrats don’t steal quite as much, quite as openly—and that the artillery shells get to the front.

This, of course, is classic Putin. “Putin is someone who generally thinks that revenge is a dish best served cold,” C.I.A. director Bill Burns said last summer at the Aspen Security Forum, and he’s right. Putin believes in punishment delayed, meted out slowly and deliberately, on his terms, on his timeline, and never under public pressure. Which is why Shoigu’s firing may have seemed like a surprise to anyone who thought Putin had moved on and forgiven. He never really does.

The real surprise, though, was the ouster of Nikolai Patrushev as the head of Russia’s National Security Council. Patrushev, a silovik’s silovik, was a K.G.B. man like Putin and shares many of Putin’s hard-line, paranoiac—and increasingly millenarian—views of the world. He was a member of Putin’s innermost circle, one of the very few people who knew about and encouraged Putin’s plans for conquering Ukraine. 

And then, bam, just like that, he was out, replaced by… Shoigu. (Today, it was announced that Patrushev would be one of the president’s special “assistants” in charge of… shipbuilding.) This one really puzzled me, so I called my good friend Mikhail Zygar, an immaculately connected Russian journalist and author of All the Kremlin’s Men. Zygar, who now lives in New York (Moscow recently issued a warrant for his arrest), has just started writing The Last Pioneer, a Substack on the inner workings of the Kremlin. It has quickly become my favorite and most illuminating source on how that byzantine place really operates. 

“They’re very close in terms of their point of view, but Patrushev has a big personal agenda,” Zygar explained when I asked him, essentially, Why Patrushev? “Even though they share a worldview, it’s a personal thing. As [Putin] gets older, he wants less and less that [others] burden him with their opinions. Patrushev is someone who is constantly buttonholing him.” This demotion, Zygar believes, is a way of shutting Patrushev up. Shoigu, Zygar added, is another example of someone who is a kindred spirit but whose opinions Putin no longer values since he now envisions himself as the generalissimo. “Putin needs fewer and fewer people,” said Zygar. “You can tell by all these arrangements that he doesn’t need people who will say anything to him. He needs people who will listen, not talk. Putin is acting like someone who is fucking fed up with people’s opinions. He already knows everything by himself.” 

Another interesting point here: Patrushev had been advocating for his son, Dmitry, who until Sunday was the agricultural minister. Patrushev apparently—and incredibly—told Putin that his son would make an excellent prime minister. (Zygar has more on Dmitry Patrushev and the other “princes” of Russia here and here; don’t miss it.) Instead, over the weekend, the younger Patrushev was promoted to vice premier at the same time that his father, Putin’s old friend Nikolai, was demoted. 

This too, Zygar points out, is classic Putin: Putin the referee, who makes sure that no one sinks too low or rises too high. “In some ways, this is a strengthening of the Patrushev clan’s influence,” Zygar said of Dmitry’s promotion (along with the promotion of another Patrushev acolyte). “In that case, if you add something in this column, you have to take something away from the other column.” By demoting Patrushev senior, Putin was able to maintain an equilibrium and show that only his own power is endless. This, Zygar explained, was a way to show both Patrushev and everyone else in the system that, in the czar’s palace, “no one’s influence is unlimited.”