“From the leadership’s perspective, this undermines the country’s defense capabilities. Someone had to answer for it,” he said.
The Kremlin has taken cautious steps. In March, for example, Putin appointed a new deputy defense minister responsible for the material and technical supply of the army, the third to occupy this position in the space of a year and a half.
Ivanov’s excesses made him a “convenient scapegoat.” Shumanov said.
It also fits into the Kremlin’s broader campaign to impose on its elite a new norm of wartime, frugal virtue, which has already seen various celebrities ostracized and, in some cases, prosecuted for public debauchery.
Ivanov “did not feel the way the wind blows,” wrote Vladimir Pastukhov of University College London, continuing to lead a flashy life “at a time when the entire elite was beginning actively changing into khaki clothes.
The Prigozhin link
Someone who felt the winds of change, before he died in a suspicious plane crash, was Wagner’s warlord Eugene Prigozhin. He denounced the Russian army’s top brass, reserving special venom for Shoigu, accusing him of depriving his mercenary forces of ammunition and equipment.
Politico
