Putin welcomes soccer world to Kremlin for World Cup draw

Vladimir Putin welcomes soccer luminaries to the Kremlin on Friday for a World Cup draw that provides a global audience for the Russian president to attempt to burnish the image of a country scandalized by sports corruption.

By staging the ceremony for the 32 World Cup finalists at the seat of Russian power and draping the Kremlin in FIFA branding, soccer's governing body is undercutting its pretense that sports and politics should not mix — and in a country where the association has proved so damaging.

A girl poses for a photo in front of a clock counting down to the first match of the 2018 World Cup, which is installed on Manezh Square, outside the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Nov. 30, 2017. The Final Draw for the 2018 FIFA World Cup will take place on Friday, Dec. 1, 2017, at the State Kremlin Palace in Moscow. (AP Photo/Denis Tyrin)

FIFA is on the final countdown to the first World Cup in Russia as it continues to assess the extent the 2014 World Cup squad was embroiled in the country's state-sponsored doping scheme. FIFA President Gianni Infantino still plans to share a stage Friday with Vitaly Mutko, the Russian deputy prime minister accused of overseeing the elaborate scheme that saw positive samples across Russian sports destroyed or hidden.

Infantino, though, is still trying to rebuild FIFA's image after far-reaching bribery scandals threatened the future of the organization. The draw comes one day short of the seventh anniversary of the World Cup vote from which so many of FIFA's legal travails stemmed.

Russian authorities deny government involvement in doping and the country has weathered FIFA corruption investigations, concerns about hooliganism, racism around games, deaths on World Cup construction sites and a sponsor shortfall to stay on track to host soccer's biggest tournament for the first time.

The view of the Troitskaya Tower and the Troitsky Bridge - the shortest way to the State Kremlin Palace, right, where the Final Draw for the 2018 Fifa World Cup in Russia will take place on December 1, Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Nov. 30, 2017. (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin)

The draw is the moment fans can start to plan their journeys across Russia, with 11 host cities spread from Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea in the west to Yekaterinburg in the Ural mountains which separate Europe and Asia.

Germany will discover the path to defending the title won in Brazil, while Iceland and Panama will be in the draw for the finals for the first time. Two teams are returning after long absences: Peru hasn't contested the World Cup since 1982 and Egypt is returning for the first time since 1990. But there is no space for four-time champion Italy, two-time reigning Copa America champion Chile, while the United States is missing for the first time since 1986.

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Russian police officers patrol the Manezh Square at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Nov. 30, 2017. The Final Draw for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia will take place on Friday, Dec. 1, 2017, at the State Kremlin Palace in Moscow. (AP Photo/Denis Tyrin)

HOW DOES THE DRAW WORK?

The draw ceremony starts at 1500 GMT on Friday at the State Kremlin Palace and is set to last for an hour. The 32 finalists will be split into eight groups featuring a team from each pot. Only Europe can have two teams in the same group.

The draw will be presided over by former England striker Gary Lineker, who has previously called for FIFA to be disbanded over bribery scandals and questioned Russia's legitimacy to host the World Cup over the doping across sports.

Greats from the eight World Cup-winning nations will serve as draw assistants: Diego Maradona (Argentina), Gordon Banks (England), Laurent Blanc (France), Cafu (Brazil), Fabio Cannavaro (Italy), Diego Forlan (Uruguay), Miroslav Klose (Germany), Carles Puyol (Spain), and Nikita Simonyan for host Russia.

Russian sports journalist Maria Komandnaya is the co-presenter.

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Children pass signs with the logo of the 2018 FIFA World Cup near the Kremlin where the Final Draw for the 2018 FIFA World Cup will take place on Friday, Dec. 1, 2017, in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Nov. 30, 2017. (AP Photo/Denis Tyrin)

WHO IS IN EACH POT?

FIFA changed how it allocates teams in the draw and now uses rankings alone for all four pots. At previous World Cups, only Pot 1 was for seeded teams, and the other three pots were decided by a geographical spread.

October FIFA ranking in brackets:

Pot 1: Russia (65), Germany (1), Brazil (2), Portugal (3), Argentina (4), Belgium (5), Poland (6), France (7).

Pot 2: Spain (8), Peru (10), Switzerland (11), England (12), Colombia (13), Mexico (16), Uruguay (17), Croatia (18).

Pot 3: Denmark (19), Iceland (21), Costa Rica (22), Sweden (25), Tunisia (28), Egypt (30), Senegal (32), Iran (34).

Pot 4: Serbia (38), Nigeria (41), Australia (43), Japan (44), Morocco (48), Panama (49), South Korea (62), Saudi Arabia (63).

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A Russian police officer guards near the Kremlin where the Final Draw for the 2018 FIFA World Cup will take place on Friday, Dec. 1, 2017, in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Nov. 30, 2017. (AP Photo/Denis Tyrin)

WHEN IS THE WORLD CUP?

Russia will play the tournament opener on June 14, 2018. The World Cup final will be held on July 15. Both showpiece games are at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. Games will also be hosted in St. Petersburg, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Saransk, Kaliningrad, Volgograd, Yekaterinburg, Samara, Sochi and Rostov-on-Don.

More than 740,000 tickets out of a total of 2.6 million have already been allocated and the next phase of sales starts on Dec. 5 through a ballot.

A signpost directing people to the entrance of the World Cup Final Draw is placed on the Red Square, with the St. Basil cathedral in the background, in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Nov. 30, 2017. The Final Draw for the 2018 Fifa World Cup in Russia will take place on December 1 in the concert hall of the State Kremlin Palace in Moscow. (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin)

Standing in his dress uniform in the back of his Aurus convertible, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu was driven around Red Square to review the troops during last week's Victory Day parade. It was to be his last inspection in that role.

Over the weekend, President Vladimir Putin replaced Shoigu — the 68-year-old was the longest serving member of his Cabinet — in a rare Kremlin shake-up that took place even as a Russian offensive in northeastern Ukraine was making gains.

Just as stunning was the choice to replace Shoigu — Andrei Belousov, a 65-year-old economics expert who has never dealt with the military or other law enforcement agencies.

Putting Belousov in charge of the Defense Ministry was seen as a way to tighten control over military spending and put the burgeoning defense sector in sync with the rest of the economy, hit hard by Western sanctions.

The reshuffle caught more than a few pundits by surprise, and some mysteries are yet to unfold.

Shoigu’s job seemed to be in jeopardy early in the 2022 invasion as Russia suffered battlefield setbacks that drew the ire of Russia's hawks. He and the chief of the military’s General Staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, were widely blamed for the failure to capture Kyiv as well as a hasty retreat by Russian troops from northeastern and southern Ukraine amid a stiff counteroffensive.

Last year, Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin unleashed a blistering and profane verbal attack on Shoigu and Gerasimov, accusing them of incompetence and corruption. In June, Prigozhin launched a mutiny to demand their ouster, seizing the military headquarters in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and sending his soldiers-for-hire on a march on Moscow that he called off hours later.

Two months later, Prigozhin and his top lieutenants died in a suspicious plane crash widely seen as Kremlin payback, while Shoigu seemed to shore up his position. The Kremlin denied involvement.

Even though he has held the defense minister's job for 11 1/2 years, Shoigu's fortunes seemed to take a further downturn last month. His deputy, Timur Ivanov, was arrested on bribery charges and hauled into court still in his military uniform. Ivanov had been Shoigu’s top associate since before becoming defense minister, and Kremlin watchers saw it as a serious blow.

But Putin is known to abhor firings under pressure, and the staunchly loyal Shoigu — who has accompanied the president on vacations in the Siberian mountains over the years — was no exception. Shoigu got a soft landing, shifted to heading the presidential Security Council and replacing Nikolai Patrushev. The role is roughly similar to the U.S. national security adviser.

Patrushev, a longtime hawkish and powerful member of Putin’s inner circle, will get a new appointment to be announced soon, the Kremlin said, leaving another unanswered question.

“Shoigu is moving into a respectable and powerful position because he is loyal, and he and Putin are friends,” Dara Massicot, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment’s Russia and Eurasia Program, said on the social media platform X.

While Shoigu gets a dignified exit from the Defense Ministry, Belousov "will probably make organizational changes,” Massicot said.

Putting an economist in charge of the Defense Ministry was seen as a way of better managing what is an increasing drain on Russia's wealth as the war's third year drags on.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasized the need to integrate the military sector more closely with the economy to “put it in sync with the current dynamics.”

Belousov graduated from the economics faculty of Moscow State University and held a succession of senior government jobs before serving as Putin’s economic adviser in 2013-20. Since then, he was a deputy prime minister in charge of economic strategies, advocating stronger state controls.

Deeply religious, Belousov has talked repeatedly about needing to uphold “traditional family values” putting him in line with Putin’s conservative agenda.

When Moscow illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, Belousov reportedly was the only member of Putin’s economic team who immediately supported the move.

Belousov isn’t Russia’s first civilian defense minister. Although Shoigu loved wearing the uniform, he had no military background; before becoming the minister, he had led the Emergency Situations Ministry, responsible for civil defense and addressing natural disasters. Previous defense ministers were Anatoly Serdyukov, the head of tax police, and Sergei Ivanov, the former foreign intelligence chief.

But Belousov’s predecessors all got the job in peacetime while he takes over in what many military analysts see as a decisive moment in the war — when Russia is trying to take advantage of a slowdown in the West sending weapons to Ukraine.

The Kremlin sought to ease the widespread bewilderment over choosing Belousov as defense minister by emphasizing that Gerasimov — the chief of the General Staff — actually directs the fighting in Ukraine.

“The chief of the General Staff is in many ways the key person who reports directly to the commander-in-chief, Putin, and the minister is really just to ensure that the military have what they need,” said Mark Galeotti, head of the Mayak Intelligence consultancy.

“Having an economist, someone who has been speaking about the need to basically subordinate much of the economy to the needs of the defense sector, actually makes a certain amount of sense. It’s now essentially a financial administrator’s job,” he said in a commentary.

Galeotti said Putin could still replace Gerasimov, describing him as “unimaginative, prone to truly wasteful operations,” and “absolutely unwilling to actually tell the commander-in-chief, to tell Putin, some of the realities of war. The Ukrainians must be hoping that he stays.”

Belousov is widely expected to purge the ministry of Shoigu’s top associates -– a move that would hardly encourage stability at a key moment in the conflict.

Still, Massicot and other observers believe that some popular commanders whom Shoigu saw as rivals and tried to sideline — including Gen. Sergei Surovikin, known to have longtime links to Prigozhin and credited for building multilayered defenses that stymied Ukraine's botched counteroffensive last summer — could again get senior positions.

Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political analyst, said Putin’s key motive was to rein in graft in the top brass, embodied by figures like Ivanov, who was arrested in April and accused of taking massive bribes.

“The situation with Timur Ivanov has shown that corruption has exceeded all limits,” Markov said. Another task for Belousov will be to work more closely with industries to modernize the military quickly, he added.

Putin likely expects Belousov to better integrate the Defense Ministry’s agenda with broader economic policies, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think-tank.

“This effort sets conditions for a fuller economic mobilization, suggesting that the Kremlin continues to prepare for a protracted war in Ukraine,” it said.

Alexandra Prokopenko of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center also sees Belousov’s appointment as a sign the Kremlin envisions a long war.

“Putin’s priority is war; war of attrition is won by economics,” she wrote. “Belousov is in favor of stimulating demand from the budget, which means that military spending will at least not decrease but rather increase.”

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is driven along Red Square in an Aurus car during the Victory Day military parade in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, May 9, 2024, marking the 79th anniversary of the end of World War II. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

FILE - Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is driven along Red Square in an Aurus car during the Victory Day military parade in Moscow, Russia, on May 9, 2024, marking the 79th anniversary of the end of World War II. The Kremlin says Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree appointing Sergei Shoigu as secretary of Russia’s national security council, replacing Nikolai Patrushev. The appointment Sunday comes after Putin proposed to appoint Andrei Belousov as the country’s defense minister instead of Shoigu, who has served in the post for years. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov speaks to the mobile phone before a meeting of the Skolkovo Foundation Board of Trustees in Moscow region, Russia, on Monday, Nov. 13, 2023. Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed removing Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu from his post. Putin nominated First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov for the role. His appointment must now be approved by Russian lawmakers. (Ekaterina Shtukina, Sputnik, Pool Photo via AP)

Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov attends a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin, in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023. Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed removing Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu from his post. Putin nominated First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov for the role. His appointment must now be approved by Russian lawmakers. (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

FILE - Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, right, gestures as he speaks to Russian Chief of General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov prior to a meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin with the top military brass in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2023. The Kremlin says Russia's President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree appointing Sergei Shoigu as secretary of Russia's national security council, replacing Nikolai Patrushev. The appointment Sunday comes after Putin proposed to appoint Andrei Belousov as the country's defense minister instead of Shoigu, who has served in the post for years. (Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, listens to First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov during their meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023. Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed removing Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu from his post. Putin nominated First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov for the role. His appointment must now be approved by Russian lawmakers. (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, talks with Russian Chief of General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov, left, and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu after a meeting with military leaders in Moscow, Russia, on Dec. 19, 2023. The Kremlin says Russia's President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree appointing Sergei Shoigu as secretary of Russia's national security council, replacing Nikolai Patrushev. The appointment Sunday comes after Putin proposed to appoint Andrei Belousov as the country's defense minister instead of Shoigu, who has served in the post for years. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu leave Red Square after the Victory Day military parade in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, May 9, 2024, marking the 79th anniversary of the end of World War II. Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed removing Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu from his post. Putin nominated First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov for the role. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov, center, gestures as he waits to attend a ceremony inaugurating Vladimir Putin as President of Russia at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia on Tuesday, May 7, 2024. Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed removing Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu from his post. Putin nominated First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov for the role. His appointment must now be approved by Russian lawmakers. (Vyacheslav Prokofyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is driven along Red Square in an Aurus car during the Victory Day military parade in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, May 9, 2024, marking the 79th anniversary of the end of World War II. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)