Decrees were published last week that the posts of Deputy Defense Ministers Sergei Shoigu instead of Dmitry Chushkin and Elena Morozova, who are considered to be Anatoly Serdyukov's people, will be occupied by Ruslan Tsalikov and Yuri Borisov. Obviously, the new minister is not going to work with the team of his predecessor, because such work would look like a story from a fable about a swan, a crayfish and a pike pulling a cart in different directions.
One of the new deputy ministers, Ruslan Tsalikov, is a man who has been working closely with Sergei Shoigu for more than twenty years. For obvious reasons, today the Minister of Defense is not up to experimenting with the personnel in the Ministry of Defense, and therefore he tries to rely on proven people in his work. Someone calls this the beginnings of a manifestation of clannishness, but such a judgment does not stand up to scrutiny. Each person who finds himself in a sufficiently high position tries to select a professional team, whose representatives can be trusted, and who have managed to prove themselves as worthy employees. Clannishness begins when, even in the absence of efficiency, the department acquires “its own people”, as it was with the previous staff. If this is considered clannishness, then it manifests itself in any state of the world in which a certain political force comes to power. Clannishness in Washington, clannishness in Paris, clannishness in Berlin …
So, Ruslan Tsalikov, who worked side by side with Sergei Shoigu both when he was the last head of the Ministry of Emergencies and during his governorship in the Moscow region, holds the post of deputy minister in charge of the financial aspects of the development of the army. After a series of corruption scandals in the Ministry of Defense, this post looks significant, because not only the image of the Ministry of Defense, but also the future of the entire military reform depends on rational financing and the degree of efficiency of spending. If Tsalikov manages to build a system in which competent control is exercised over the financial component of the activities of the main military department, then the modernization of the army itself will no longer be subject to skepticism on the part of the military and representatives of, shall we say, the civil society.
Tsalikov has a wealth of management experience. For four years he served as Minister of Finance of the Republic of North Ossetia (1990-1994). It was the hardest time not only for North Ossetia itself, but for the whole country. However, according to experts who are not by hearsay familiar with his activities, Tsalikov did everything to protect the republic from financial influence from the forces supporting extremists in the North Caucasus, and was one of those Ossetian politicians who obstructed the very idea of separating the North Caucasus from Russia. This alone gives reason to talk about Tsalikov as a strong statesman and manager, capable of solving complex problems without falling under negative external pressure.
Active work in the republican ministry brought Ruslan Tsalikov to the Ministry of Emergency Situations, where he was engaged in financial and economic activities for a number of years. Thanks to his work, too, the Ministry of Emergency Situations became one of the most equipped departments in Russia, which was paid attention to by representatives of both the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Defense.
After the transfer of Sergei Shoigu to the governor's post in the Moscow region, he took Ruslan Tsalikov as his deputy. Therefore, it is worth counting on the fact that Tsalikov is the person you can really trust, and this, admittedly, has become a rarity in our Ministry of Defense lately: trust has faded away like an ephemeral aroma with a wide open window.
The post of deputy minister in charge of weapons issues was taken by Yuri Borisov. He graduated from the Pushkin Higher Command Air Defense School. In addition, Borisov also has a diploma from Moscow State University in his luggage.
From 1974 to 1998, Yuri Borisov served in the Armed Forces, after which he moved to the position of General Director of ZAO NPTs Modul. At one time, this company was engaged in the creation of software and hardware for computer equipment, which was also used in the military sphere.
For four years (2004-2008) Borisov worked as head of the Department of the radio-electronic industry and control systems, deputy head of the Federal Agency for Industry. It was this area of work that brought Yuri Borisov to the Ministry of Industry, and then to that segment of the Government of the Russian Federation, which is associated with the activities of the Military-Industrial Commission, which is responsible for work in the field of the State Defense Order.
Based on the biography of Yuri Borisov, it follows that this man is not by chance turned out to be the Deputy Minister of Defense. Despite the fact that Borisov does not in any way belong to the so-called "Shoigu team", he was called to the department to solve painful tasks to solve problems with the State Defense Order. In recent years, this problem has become one of the main ones, leading to a significant slowdown in the implementation of military reform. Considering that Borisov himself is well acquainted with the state of affairs in the Russian military-industrial sector, this gives him the opportunity to say that he can take a balanced approach to concluding contracts with suppliers, and, to be honest, more actively negotiate in plan to start implementing large-scale production projects.
The new deputies of the new defense minister, at least due to their professional characteristics, no longer look like random people in the Defense Ministry. In this regard, we can say that the "bachelorette party" in the main military department of Russia is over. In place of employees who managed to show their clearly not high professionalism in the light of the current series of corruption scandals, completely different people come.
It is not worth giving out unnecessarily large advances, but I would like to hope that the professionals in the Ministry of Defense, who have occupied, perhaps, the most troublesome positions, will justify the trust that they have shown.
Today, the financial, economic and military-technical divisions of the Ministry face the primary task of establishing a high-quality dialogue with manufacturers of weapons and military equipment at such a level that there will be no slippage in the implementation of the State Defense Order, which has set the teeth on edge in recent years. The task, of course, is difficult, but that is why the top leaders of the Ministry of Defense are not random people.
