The ghost of Kiev

The last time Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigou was seen was on March 11 when he met with his Turkish counterpart in Moscow. Since then, speculations have been flying. Until then, he was a media character in Russia. It appeared almost every day on the news. He was the man who had the Second Code of the nuclear arsenal after Vladimir Putin. He is even considered the successor of the Russian leader. A lot of power in his hands that apparently broke out when the invasion of Ukraine was not going as planned in the Kremlin. In Russian and Ukrainian social networks they already talk about the “ghost of Kiev”.

In Moscow they say he is absent because of “heart problems”. No one gives details. The last time he was mentioned was on March 18 when he allegedly attended a meeting of the Security Council, but no photos or video of the meeting were shown. That night, images of him appeared on the news, but of the meeting seven days ago with the Turkish minister. And the last public appearance he had with Putin was on February 27 when he was ordered to put the nuclear arsenal on high alert.

The versions are advancing much faster than Russian forces in Ukraine. One says that Shoigu was behind a supposed coup d'état to overthrow Putin and that is why he is going to be tried for treason and corruption. Another was sent to his dacha in “pajamas”, which is what Cubans call those who are displaced from power and remain under virtual house arrest, for their mismanagement of the military offensive with at least 10,000 Russian soldiers killed. A third says he fell into a purge launched by Putin after the United States and Britain disseminated plans for the invasion with enormous precision, information that was only known to his inner circle. And the fourth is attributed to the fact that his youngest daughter, Ksenia, 31, was seen posing in the Ukrainian colors, light blue and yellow, in a photo that her friends uploaded to Instagram.

The official website of the Kremlin published on March 18, that Shoigu, 66, and Putin had discussed the “progress of the special operation in Ukraine” with the permanent members of the Security Council. But no images were shown. On the same day, the official Channel One broadcast a report on Shoigu's presentation of military awards, but with a video taken on March 11. The news site Agentstvo reported that the minister had been sent to emergency detention for a heart problem, according to a source in his office.

The London Daily Mail quoted MI6 intelligence sources as saying that Putin launched a witch hunt looking for “culprits” behind his stalled invasion and that he is “furious” at the alleged leak of his military plans. The Russian leader is convinced that this is why his initial plan to seize Kiev with elite forces on the first day of the invasion failed. Russian security expert Andrei Soldatov commented that military counterintelligence is particularly investigating a department of the FSB security service. “That could mean that, eventually, people in Moscow began to wonder why American intelligence was so accurate,” he told The New Yorker.

The same British sources claim that Putin was privately dismissive of his old ally Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB security service, and Valery Gerasimov, the Russian Chief of Staff. Another target of Putin's fury was Igor Kostyukov, deputy chief of the Armed Forces General Staff, who would face imminent impeachment as part of a broader purge. Before the invasion, he had already publicly humiliated the head of foreign intelligence of the SVR, Sergey Naryshkin.

Putin cannot understand how the pro-Russian population of Ukraine did not take to the streets to experience the entry of Russian forces and did not help them to eliminate the defense. Nor does he understand how it is possible that US President Joe Biden denounced all his plans in these four weeks of war before the order moved the troops on the ground.

Biden warned of the preparation of a palatial coup in Kiev and the installation of a puppet government under former President Victor Yanukovych, a chemical weapons attack to blame Ukrainians and attacks on civilians, also to say that it had been the work of the enemy. The United States was ahead of all the moves and Putin is on fire because he believes that there is a “mole” in his intimate environment. And it is there that the figure of Sergey Shoigu appears, who until now was one of his few trusted people and who is now questioned because he did not detect the leak in time.

Shoigou is part of the St. Petersburg circle, the Siloviki (former KGB agents at the time when Putin was an intelligence agent) who accompanied him in his rise to power. He's not a military training. He has a degree in civil engineering. He held several official positions until, in 2012, when Putin appointed him Minister of Defense. He is a scholar of Russian history and shares with the president his love of hunting and fishing. Several times they went to the tundra together for that purpose. According to The Siberian Times, Shoigou is fluent in nine languages, including English, Japanese, Chinese and Turkish, as well as Russian.

Minister Shoigu is not ethnically Russian. His father is of the Tuvan ethnic group and his mother is Ukrainian. He was born in a village near the Mongolia region. This makes it a rarity in Putin's inner circle that claims Russian nationalism and racial purity. According to the research carried out by the dissident Aleksei Navalny's NGO, Shoigu has an immense wealth accumulated since he held official positions alongside Putin. He has a Japanese-style mansion in the Barvikha area, on the outskirts of Moscow, not far from the official residence of his boss, valued at 18 million dollars. He has a salary of $85,000 a year. He also has an important residence on the Florida peninsula, which was named after one of his daughters as soon as she turned 18, and a yacht with mooring in a port in southern Italy.

Now, the world is wondering where the chief military officer for the invasion of Ukraine can be and who should be present if Putin occurs to launch some kind of nuclear weapon. Without his fingerprint, it would be impossible to activate the system.

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