Letter From the Editors
Nobody likes to lose. Children learn early just how much they dislike it, and it shapes their ambitions for life. Things get interesting when the most competitive kids on the playground grow up and enter public life – then they start playing for higher stakes, and the losers’ names get splashed across the headlines.
Case in point, an NGE investigation has found that Russia’s glut of public corruption cases in the recent past is not merely a law-enforcement campaign. “The fight against corruption in authoritarian regimes isn’t punishment for theft and bribery – it’s a tool for controlling the bureaucracy. . . . Repression is an important mechanism for keeping officials on their toes,” NGE writes. In a fitting simile, scholar Nikolai Petrov comments: “It’s like a game of musical chairs: Someone is always going to lose their seat. Nobody wants to be the one left standing, and that’s a very important motivating role that repression plays.”
But of course, democratic systems create their own sense of pressure for officials to keep their seats. Over the trenches in Ukraine, Prime Minister Yulia Sviridenko submitted her resignation to President Zelensky, making way for “technocrat” Naftogaz CEO Sergei Koretsky. Unlike the Russian officials, Sviridenko is not suspected of corruption and she is not headed to prison, but most likely to Washington as ambassador. Zelensky explained the move as “staffing changes that will guarantee the implementation of a new political strategy.”
The real reason came out shortly afterward, in terms franker than one is accustomed to in wartime. Vedomosti cites Ukrainian news sources as saying Defense Minister Fyodorov “proposed ‘dramatic staffing decisions’ to Zelensky, which would have included replacing [Commander in Chief] Syrsky,” in response to which “Syrsky essentially presented Zelensky with the ultimatum that only one of them could remain in their position.” The same source continues that Zelensky told his party leaders the two men “are living in two different worlds. Ideally, it would be best to replace them both, but I can’t do that at the same time.” Thus, Izvestia interprets that “Zelensky couldn’t simply fire Fyodorov, so he used a reshuffling of the entire cabinet to switch out ministers at several agencies.”
Readers are reminded that Mikhail Fyodorov initially gained popularity as digitalization minister by introducing the Ukrainian public services app Diia, then, as The Moscow Times points out, he “called on SpaceX owner Elon Musk to switch on the Starlink satellite Internet service over Ukraine.” But even Fyodorov admits that Syrsky “saved” Ukraine during Russia’s initial Kiev offensive before retaking Kharkov Province later in 2022. Now Fyodorov is out, and Syrsky may be too, the next time the music stops.
But all this pales in comparison to the biggest job rotation of the year, as reported by The New York Times, no less. After infamous Iranian ex-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared at supreme leader Ali Khamenei’s funeral, apparently leaving “egg on the faces” of rumormongers, the Gray Lady has resurrected the assertion that one purpose behind the February launch of war against Iran was a plot by US and Israeli intelligence to install him as the country’s leader. If that was the plan, at least one party appears to have moved out of turn.
Finally, we must consider the chairs at the nuclear table, to which Iran has not been invited. China, by contrast, has been expanding its deterrent capability at a rate the two cold war powers must countenance. Scholar Ruslan Polonchuk appears to empathize with Trump’s withdrawal from the international arms control regime when he writes: “Washington is forced to take into account the existence of two potentially ‘equal nuclear powers’ – Russia and China – which qualitatively changes the US approach toward strategic planning.” Hopefully the three powers can find a compromise on weapon levels soon, because in a nuclear arms race, everyone is a loser.