‘We’ll Have Both Guns And Butter’: Putin Goes All-In On Statist Push

Committed statist. Incorruptible technocrat. Son of a Soviet economist. That's Andrey Belousov. And that's who's running the show now at Vladimir Putin's defense ministry following a long overdue demotion for Sergei Shoigu, who'll join Dmitry Medvedev in the Kremlin's security council, a three-decade-old consultative body which doubles as a ceremonial retirement community for disrated officials Putin still likes. (In 2020, when Medvedev stepped down as prime minister, he was reassigned to the s