Vladimir Putin’s inauguration to his fifth term as president this month was more imperial than ever before — at one point the patriarch of Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, even addressed the modern-day tsar as “your highness”.
But what really made Putin’s vision clear came last week: a government reshuffle that showed how he plans to reshape Russia, turning it into a permanently mobilised, war-fighting state — with profound consequences for the rest of the world.
The headline move was the removal of Sergei Shoigu, the long-serving defence minister, and his replacement by Andrei Belousov, a former deputy prime minister. The new man, an economist by training, is no more a soldier than his predecessor but he is an organiser and planner