Sergei Shoigu and Valery Guerasimov, Vladimir Putin's masters of war

When Vladimir Putin is not alone in front of the screen, they are almost always there.

Since the start of the invasion in Ukraine, the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, and the Chief of the Defense Staff, Valeri Guerassimov, have become the faces of the war.

These two relatives of the master of the Kremlin played, for example, the military stooges of Vladimir Putin when the latter announced on television, on February 28, that he had put the Russian nuclear power on alert.

No wonder the Kremlin decided to put Sergei Shoigu and Valeri Guerassimov in the spotlight.

In the eyes of the Russian president, they are the architects of the victorious campaign to annex Crimea in 2014, of Russian military strategy in Syria, and of support for pro-Russian rebels in the Donbass region. 

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They are also perceived as being among the most faithful among Vladimir Putin's faithful and seem to constantly evolve in pairs.

They were both appointed in 2012 a few weeks apart to their respective posts, and according to an adage, Sergei Shoigu will remain in post as long as Valeri Guerassimov remains Chief of Staff and vice versa. .

However, these two men placed on the front line to implement the will of the Russian president in Ukraine have very different backgrounds and profiles.

He is the eternal dolphin.

Sergei Shoigu is one of the rare members of the first circle of power to have had as much influence under Boris Yeltsin, at the end of the 1990s, as under Vladimir Putin.

This apparatchik began his political career at the end of the Soviet era, to become, in 2012, a Minister of Defense without military experience.

A feature that is not uncommon under Vladimir Putin, anxious to dismiss the officers in this position.

But Sergei Shoigu does not have the experience of the secret services either, which is much less common among those close to Putin.

His great quality is that he is "a servant for the tsars and a father for the soldiers", writes the Russian daily Moscow Times, paraphrasing the famous poem "Borodino", by Mikhail Lermontov, to the glory of the heroism of the Russian army.

Less lyrical, Sergei Konvis, a politician from the Tuva region in Siberia, where Sergei Shoigu is from, describes the Minister of Defense as a "perfect chameleon", capable of transforming at will to bend to the good pleasure. leaders. 

Thus, under Boris Yeltsin, he became known as the Minister of Emergency Situations.

At the turn of the 21st century, this organization had become a veritable small state within a state, with more than 350,000 men and even a specific police force ready to deploy at the slightest fire on Russian soil.

A very active minister who never failed to travel to the scene of a tragedy, which earned him strong popularity… and the title of Boris Yeltsin's heir apparent.

But it was Vladimir Putin who took power in 2002. Sergei Shoigu did not seem to take offense and immediately put himself at the service of the new strongman of the Kremlin.

He notably led the United Russia party, in the pay of Vladimir Putin, in order to cement the hold of the president on the Russian political game.

Sergei Shoigu has also invited Vladimir Putin several times to his house in Tuva, where he has organized highly publicized fishing trips.

However, he is not just an outstanding courtier.

Sergei Shoigu is described as responsible for a vast modernization of the Russian army, underlines the British Guardian.

It was also he who, as Minister of Defense, supervised the very dreaded GRU - the Russian military intelligence service - which is suspected of having multiplied, in the 2010s, assassination operations in Europe.

Starting with the attempted poisoning in Salisbury (England) of ex-double agent Sergei Skripal in 2018…

The current Chief of Defense Staff is a myth.

Not that Valeri Guerasimov doesn't exist.

This career soldier born in 1955 in Kazan - one of the most populous cities in Russia after Moscow - did indeed serve in the armored divisions of the Red Army throughout the territory of the former Soviet Union.

Valeri Gerasimov was also one of the commanders of the North Caucasus army during the second Chechen war (1999-2009).

On this occasion, he drew the praise of the famous journalist and critic of Russian power Anna Politkovskaya - assassinated in 2006 - who said of him that he was the example "of a man who knew how to preserve his honor officer” during this war, told the BBC in 2012. His feat of arms: having arrested and condemned a Russian soldier accused of having brutalized and murdered a young Chechen during the conflict.

And there is no doubt that it is this general, described by Sergei Shoigu as a “soldier from head to toe”, who has been the chief of staff of all the Russian armies since 2012. he was the one who led the operations in Ukraine in 2014, in Syria and today again in Ukraine.

But its international fame rests on a myth, or more exactly a misunderstanding.

Valeri Guerassimov is considered the father of a military doctrine which, in reality, does not exist or has been misunderstood.

It is he who is said to be the inventor of the Russian "hybrid war", the one that mixes the use of conventional weapons with non-military methods - such as disinformation, or cyberattacks - to prepare the ground for the soldiers.

There is even a “Guerasimov doctrine” to designate this military approach.

Except that the inventor of this term, the British specialist in Russian military questions Mark Galeotti, has repeatedly tried to rectify the situation, assuring that there is no such official doctrine in Russia.

And that Valeri Guerassimov is, in any case, nothing of a theoretician of war.

It all stems from a speech given by the latter in 2013, in which he asserted that the “boundary between times of war and peace had become increasingly blurred” and that the “non-military means for achieving strategic goals had gained in importance”.

A discourse that, after the annexation of Crimea where such unconventional means (pro-Russian propaganda in Ukraine, creation of incidents to justify war aims) were applied, seemed prophetic to observers. 

The “Guerassimov doctrine” had just won its letters of nobility and the speech of the Chief of Staff was studied very closely in Washington, says the Financial Times.

Except that Valeri Guerassimov's analysis "did not describe how the Russian army should act, but how this soldier thought that the West operated", underlines Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Russian Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, questioned by the Financial Times.

Clearly, Valeri Gerasimov thought that this “hybrid war” was what the United States had used to foment the Arab Springs and that Washington was seeking to practice against the power in place in Moscow.

This soldier was therefore not the visionary and great strategist that the West feared.

“Unfortunately, like the monster escaped from a horror movie, this idea of ​​a 'hybrid warfare' doctrine has taken shape in analyst circles in Washington and entire reflections have been made in which the 'Guerasimov doctrine ' is a central piece of 'chaos theory', according to which Russia was seeking to sow global disorder”, underlines Michael Kofman, one of the greatest American specialists in the Russian army.

Valeri Guerassimov and his mythical doctrine embodied the return of the great Russian villain, “although he had probably not even written this damn speech himself”, concludes Mark Galeotti.

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