Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday sacked four deputy defence ministers and appointed a woman, Anna Tsivileva, the West has called his “close relative” to a top defence ministry post as part of an ongoing shake-up of Russia’s military leadership.
Tsivileva is the daughter of Putin’s cousin, according to Russian media.
Putin sacked deputy defence ministers Nikolai Pankov, Ruslan Tsalikov, Tatiana Shevtsova and Pavel Popov, according to Kremlin decrees.
Leonid Gornin, a deputy finance minister, will be a first deputy defence minister under Defence Minister Andrei Belousov.
Pavel Fradkov, the son of former Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, was appointed a deputy defence minister. Oleg Savelyev was also appointed deputy defence minister.
The appointment comes after Putin removed his long-time defence chief Sergei Shoigu last month, replacing him with economist Andrey Belousov, and following the arrest of several high-ranking military figures on corruption charges.
Analysts said the purge at the top of Russia’s defence establishment was a sign Moscow believes it can beat Ukraine on the battlefield by outspending and outlasting Kyiv and its Western backers.
They said the Kremlin also wants to get tighter control of the military’s vast spending.
Britain hit Tsivileva with sanctions in 2022, naming her “Putin’s first cousin once removed” and the European Union listed her a “close relative” of Putin.
She headed a major coal company and a government-backed fund to support the families of soldiers fighting in Ukraine.
At the defence ministry she will oversee social welfare and benefits for soldiers.
Fradkov was a senior official inside Putin’s presidential administration and is the son of Mikhail Fradkov, who headed Russia’s foreign intelligence service for almost a decade and was one of Putin’s prime ministers in the 2000s.
A former finance ministry official, Leonid Gornin, was also appointed first deputy defence minister.
The changes are part of the largest overhaul of Russia’s defence ministry since it sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022.
It comes with Russian forces grinding forward on the battlefield and with Putin demanding Ukraine’s full withdrawal from the south and east of the country as a precondition to peace talks.
Those demands were rejected by Kyiv as a territorial “ultimatum” reminiscent of Adolf Hitler.
In a major diplomatic summit in Switzerland over the weekend, Kyiv won support for the principle that its “territorial integrity” should be respected in any peace deal with Russia, though several key countries refused to back that call.