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 security council, where he took up the role of deputy chairman. Putin created the position by decree that very same day. Shoigu will be secretary of the council. Putin’s the chair.)

Belousov, 65, was born to Rem Belousov, a soldier-turned academic who dedicated his Master’s thesis to expounding the “fundamentals” of East Germany’s command economy. Andrey entered the civil service informally around the turn of the century as an external advisor to two prime ministers (Mikhail Kasyanov and Mikhail Fradkov) and then formally as deputy minister of economic development.

He served in the prime minister’s office as director of finance and economics during the Medvedev interregnum — the period from 2008 to 2012 when Putin let Medvedev play president. After a brief ministerial stint, he became an economic assistant to Putin, a role he held for seven years before being named first deputy prime minister during the shakeup that sent Medvedev into semi-retirement and elevated Mikhail Mishustin to prime minister. When Mishustin got COVID in the spring of 2020, Belousov became acting prime minister for a month.

As of today (because it’s not exactly as if anyone has a choice when Putin decides to make an appointment, including and especially the appointee), Belousov’s in charge of the Russian war machine despite having never served a day in the military, or at least not as far as I can tell.

Belousov’s hardly an anomaly in being completely unqualified for his new role. Loyalty matters far more than competency in Putin’s regime, and thank god for that if you’re Shoigu, whose strategic haplessness made him the target of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed 2023 coup.

But Belousov’s incompetency is confined to military matters, and there only for lack of experience. Unlike Shoigu, Belousov apparently doesn’t count ineptitude as a character trait. By most accounts, he’s a capable economist and on every account a dedicated technocrat.

If you can get past the lack of battlefield experience (admittedly difficult considering his new title), Belousov’s a natural fit for the job: He’s an unflinching Kremlin loyalist, an ardent statist and a proponent of applied economics at a time when Russia’s economy is on a war footing and very likely to stay that way in perpetuity.

Belousov will enthusiastically embrace an opportunity to oversee even closer integration between the Russian economy and the war at a time when defense spending is the highest since the fall of the Soviet Union both as a share of total outlays and as a percentage of GDP.

In explaining the shakeup, Dmitri Peskov cited “geopolitical circumstances.” The economic-military nexus “requires special attention,” he added.

It’s possible — indeed it seems likely — that Belousov’s recommendations will occasionally work at cross purposes with the efforts of Elvira Nabiullina, whose deft maneuvering during the early days of the war was widely credited with keeping the proverbial train on the tracks amid Western efforts to cripple the Russian economy and undermine the currency.

Belousov will surely be an advocate for lavish defense spending, which is to say the upward trajectory illustrated by the figure above will continue unabated. Any money saved by putting a fastidious pencil-pusher at the helm will be more than offset by the cost of dialing up arms production and putting the economy completely in the service of the war.

The idea will be to spend more money (probably a lot more), but to spend it efficiently. Because everyone knows statist regimes and command economies are models of efficiency.

In addition, Belousov will champion capital controls if and when they’re “necessary” as well as levies on excess corporate profits.

It isn’t clear how (or if) an even bigger role for government, more fiscal outlays and what’s likely to be a low-rate bias, can be squared with Nabiullina’s penchant for orthodox policies in the service of keeping inflation at bay. It’s possible Putin believes the Russian economic transition is now far enough along that Nabiullina’s firefighting can be subordinated to… well, to firing and fighting, and to domestic spending aimed at insulating the public from the realities of the war raging on Russia’s border.

As Konstantin Malofeyev, the sanctioned monarchist billionaire, put it on social media, “With the right planning, which is what [Belousov] supports, we’ll have both guns and butter.”