RIA Novosti: Sergei Shoigu’s First Year as Defense Minister: Preliminary Results

(RIA Novosti – Aleksey Mukhin – November 5, 2013) A news conference ­ Sergei Shoigu: A year as Defense Minister. Performance results ­ was held at the RIA Novosti multimedia press center. During the event, General Director of the Center for Political Information and Valdai Club expert Alexei Mukhin presented a report on the activities of the Defense Ministry during this period.

According to Mukhin, the Russian army has always been personified by the minister, who has a huge influence on the public perception of the armed forces in general. With extensive experience in public administration and building operational entities (the Ministry of the Emergencies and the Governor of the Moscow Region), Sergei Shoigu went ahead to overcome the legacy left by his predecessor Serdyukov, and has used the last 12 months to create the tools, the mechanisms and the team in order to be able to adequately respond to the needs and expectations of Russian society. Alexei Mukhin believes that the team of like-minded people that Shoigu has created has a good head start in building effective relations with senior officers insofar as it is necessary for resolving the tasks at hand.

According to Alexei Mukhin, the phrase, “the new image of the armed forces,” which was widely used by former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, has lost its original meaning and become a symbol of failed reform. Today, the focus should shift to correcting errors and re-creating effective and combat-ready armed forces. Apparently, Mukhin says, the minister is trying to use a system-wide approach to address this task, which is comforting and inspiring, since everything that Serdyukov did as a minister was strange, overly complicated and very secretive. There was no integrity previously; that is “reform was sort of underway; it was in the news, but the things that were happening at the Defense Ministry or the armed forces were not clear even to Serdyukov.”

According to Mukhin, in addition to certain efforts designed to commercialize the army and the military institutions, it was difficult to spot anything that would be indicative of the success of military reform. It is no coincidence that the de-commercialization of the ministry was one of the areas chosen by Sergei Shoigu as a determining factor for developing the armed forces.  Mukhin believes that this is a very important area of focus which, along with greater transparency, will significantly reduce the level of corruption moving forward. The minister is doing everything in his power to prevent using military facilities for personal gain in the future.

According to Alexei Mukhin, the main result of Sergei Shoigu’s first year as a minister is “an increased level of trust not only between senior officers and the minister, but in the armed forces in general.” Now, we can say that “morale in the army is up, something that has not been the case since the 1990s, when certain representatives of civil society criticized the Ministry of Defense even more harshly than its worst enemies.”

Summing up the results of Sergei Shoigu’s first year as the Defense Minister, Mukhin says that this year was a year of rehabilitation. According to him, the old things that worked well were returned, and the armed forces have been socialized to a certain extent.

During the news conference, Alexei Mukhin and two other experts ­ Pavel Verkhnyatsky, Leading Analyst at the Center for Political Information, and Sergei Grinyaev, President of the Center for Strategic Assessments and Forecasts ­ assessed the decisions made by the Defense Minister in the area of military strategy and military construction, including those related to manning and rearming the  armed forces, troop command and control and improving the quality of their training, and promoting military science and education. They have reviewed several social decisions made by the Defense Ministry related to reviving the combat spirit and traditions in the army, making military service more humane and providing housing and medical support to the military.