"If a Third World War breaks out, would be nuclear and devastating" said the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in an interview with Al Jazeera causing concern worldwide. But how does the use of nuclear weapons work in Russia? The approval of President Vladimir Putin alone is not enough to "push the button". Three keys, three codes are need to authorize an atomic attack. One is hold by Putin, the second is in the hands of the Chief of Defense Valery Gerasimov and the third is in the hands of the Defense Minister, Sergej Shoigu. If even one of the three codes is not sent, the nuclear attack is canceled.
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So a Russian nuclear action necessarily passes for the approval of the Defense Minister Serghej Kuzugetovic Shoigu, one of Putin 's loyalist man. He has no military experience - he is a civil engineer - but he has become a central figure of Kremlin after the successes in Crimea (2014) and Syria.
But who is Shoigu? 66 years old, he was born in Cadan, in the Siberian Russia. His father was a journalist and politician and his mother was a peasant from Ukraine. Graduated in civil engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Krasnoyarsk, he never served in the military, although he is known for having reintroduced the obligation for general staff officers to wear the uniform of victory (the Soviet uniform of 1945). At 34, between 1988 and 1989, he became secretary of the local branch of Abakan of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Then he moved to Moscow, where he began his climb to the top of the state , despite the collapse of the USSR: in 1990 he was appointed deputy head of the state committee for architecture and construction, then from 1994, he was not even 40 years old when he joined the government as Minister for Emergency Situations. In 2012 he held the role of governor of the Moscow Oblast for a few months (a role comparable to that of the regional president) but was immediately recalled to the Kremlin: Putin wanted him by his side as Minister of Defense .
The quote from Alexander III, Tsar of "Russification"
In his years as defense minister, Serghej Shoigu "signed" the military successes of the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the operations in Syria and now he is among the directors of the russian invasion of Ukraine. Little is known about his political thought: he never sided one party between conservatives and reformists, always remaining aligned with Putin's orders. However after the invasion of Crimea he said that "the sovereignty of Russia is guaranteed by its army and its fleet". A quote from Alexander III, a tsar of the second half of the 19th century, who remained in history for his nationalist ideas and for his policies of "russification" in Poland, Georgia and Armenia.
As a minister, Serghej Shoigu pursued a reform of the military, creating the aerospace forces - combining aeronautics and space - and strengthening the hi-tech aspect of the army with a new command for cyber operations. Internally he was a skilled ally of Putin's strategist: when aggressive policies against Crimea provoked Western sanctions, he offered the oligarchs the opportunity to recover with public contracts, doing business in the sector of defense to rebuild a new military industrial complex.
The president's friend
The loyalty to Putin is certainly the figure that most makes him known in the Kremlin entourage. He is often defined as the man on whom the president can "rely at any time". Between the Miniser and the president there is also a good personal relationship, the two sharing common hobbies such as fishing and bathing in the country's rivers.
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