The Russian power players who could take down Putin

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For about 12 hours last Saturday, Vladimir Putin seemed finished – toppled not by peaceful pro-democracy protestors, nor an election, but by a mutiny from one of the very armed groups he established as a tool of his dictatorship.

Today, if there is one thing those who dream of Putin’s downfall have learned from Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed uprising against the Kremlin, it is that might makes right. It is a lesson Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the exiled oligarch turned pro-democracy activist, has taken to heart. “We need to wake up to the fact that the fall of the Putin regime and the creation of a better Russia will not come about through the ballot box or other peaceful means but will require armed insurrection,” he wrote in the aftermath of the Wagner coup.

Such remarks have appalled his natural supporters. Many liberal, anti-Putin Russians have gone into exile rather than support the invasion of Ukraine. But the inescapable truth is that just as Putin’s grip on power rests on men with guns, so do the means of loosening it. So what are the Russian factions best placed to seize power – and can Putin trust them?

The current minister of defence is the obvious winner from Saturday’s botched mutiny.

He controls the army, navy and air force – the most powerful of the “armed corporations” that Alex Gabuev of the Carnegie Eurasia Centre believes will hold the balance of power when Putin dies. He is also a brilliant political operator and survivor who has remained at the top of Russian government since before Putin came to power.

His longevity is partly down to a decision not to contest Putin’s ascent to power in 2000 – something Putin has warmly rewarded.

Yet a string of military disasters since have tarnished his brand. “If it was January of last year and you asked me who could replace Putin, I would have unquestionably said Shoigu,” says Mark Galeotti, an expert on the Russian security services. “Now, there is no way he can be king. But a kingmaker – that’s another question.”

For months, Shoigu has been viciously attacked not only by Prigozhin, but by a vast network of “patriotic” ultra-nationalist and pro-war bloggers who blame him for the needless deaths of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers.

That suits Putin, whose model of government requires underlings take the blame for anything that goes wrong.

But Shoigu’s victory in the power struggle with Prigozhin is proof that his political skills remain sharp, and that he retains access to Putin, the real currency of power in contemporary Russia.

One reason may be that tactical blunders on the battlefield may not necessarily be political blunders in the Kremlin. “Having an incompetent minister of defence is a feature, not a bug,” says Gabuev. “It is horrible statesmanship, but it is a reasonable way of securing yourself if you are worried about internal threats.”

If Shoigu is still in post, he will have a seat at the table when the elite try to work out what to do after Putin dies. But his chances of acting independently against the boss today are slim. “The whole clan that backed and surrounded him is gone,” says Nikolai Petrov, a veteran observer of Russian domestic politics currently with SWP, a German foreign policy think tank. “Shoigu is finished.”

Shoigu’s greatest weakness is that he is not a soldier. Even before the Ukraine war exposed his incompetence, few of Russia’s 1.15 million soldiers, sailors and airmen would have been devoted enough to follow him in a bid for power.

Putin typically appoints outsiders to such positions for exactly that reason, says Petrov. But the same is not true of the career officers.

As Sergey Markov, a Russian political analyst close to the Kremlin acknowledged this week, there are a great many Russian soldiers who share Prigozhin’s disgust with the high command.

They did not back the mutiny, and Markov insists the army remains devoted to fighting “neo-Nazis in Ukraine”. But the soldiers also know better than anyone else how disastrous the invasion is, and have just seen how easy it is to run a brigade or two up the M4 highway to Moscow.

If you had to name one officer with the public profile to act, it would be Sergei “Armageddon” Surovikin, the commander of the Aerospace Forces.

A fighting general, popular among the troops and respected as competent – if thoroughly brutal – by enemies and allies alike, Surovikin is probably the only Russian general to emerge from the disaster in Ukraine with any kind of public credibility.

His retreat from Kherson in November 2022 was one of few well-executed Russian operations of the war. Perhaps it is no coincidence then, that Gen Surovikin is now missing and presumed arrested.

During his last appearance – in a video message appealing to Prigozhin and Wagner to end the mutiny – he was wearing no rank slides or other insignia, and spoke with an unusually ponderous, slow voice that led some to speculate he was drunk or drugged.

The Dossier Centre, an investigative agency funded by Khodorkovsky, claimed to have obtained documents showing Gen Surovikin was a secret “VIP” member of Wagner.

There may be other, as yet unknown, mutineers waiting in the wings. But Russia’s military does not have a happy history of political interventions.

The last time it did was in 1953, when Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the hero of the Second World War, personally arrested Lavrenty Beria, the universally loathed secret police chief poised to succeed Stalin. The KGB and its successors learnt their lesson. Today’s military is thoroughly infiltrated by the 2nd Service Federal Security Service (FSB), which is nominally about military counter intelligence but really devoted to detecting disloyalty.

“Since the arrest of Beria, the idea has been that the army – brothers-in-arms who all know each other and think they are all heroes – is a natural political entity, that it must therefore be dismantled,” says Gabuev.

“That’s why, unlike generals in Western armies or even Asian armies, who need to be at the table to advise leaders on complex policy matters, Russian commanders have a much narrower remit and a much narrower education.

“In Russia military education and the quality of sophistication is very, very different. Again, that is a feature, not a bug. The KGB tried to make sure these people do not have a clue how to run the state, so they do not try. ”

In August 1991, Muscovites woke up to find Swan Lake playing on television and tanks rolling through the streets.

The leadership of the KGB, deciding that Mikhail Gorbachev had become more of a threat to the Soviet Union than an asset, had arrested the head of the Soviet Union. Like Prigozhin’s mutiny, the 1991 coup ultimately failed. It was poorly planned, shunned by most of the armed forces and utterly out of touch with the public mood. But the FSB, which can call on as many as 80,000 staff, remains the most powerful armed agency in Russia. With responsibility for counter intelligence, counter terrorism, border control, and foreign intelligence operations in the countries of the former Soviet Union, it regards itself as the ultimate guarantor of Russian statehood. It even runs its own special forces, including the Alfa and Vympel units.

These are the “siloviki” – the shadowy “men of force” rooted in the world of espionage and influence. Putin trusts them. He is one, after all, and they are among the main beneficiaries of his 23 years in power.

But if – and it is a big if – its senior leadership decided Putin had become a liability, they may well act to remove him. Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the security council and a former FSB chief “is the tribune of the spooks”. “He has traction over Putin’s thinking, and is powerful because he manages access to the top man. But his personal authority decreases dramatically as soon as Putin is off the stage,” says Galeotti.

Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB, wields more direct hard power as the controller of the “armed corporation”, argues Gabuev. But he is barely out of step with either Putin or Patrushev.

He and Patrushev are also as dependent on Putin as he is on them. Over the past 16 months they have presided over catastrophic intelligence failures that in any other country would have seen them sacked.

They painted an entirely misleading picture of the situation in Ukraine ahead of the invasion, directly leading to a military disaster. And the FSB’s second department failed to stop Prigozhin’s mutiny.

Naturally, to avoid entrusting too much power to one organisation, there are rival “silovik” agencies – including the Federal Guards Service, the “praetorian guard” responsible for Putin’s personal security. But there is little doubt that, despite its failings, the FSB remains the most formidable agency in the country. If it turned on Putin, he would struggle to survive.

In the immediate aftermath of Prigozhin’s mutiny, Putin confined himself to video addresses. Shoigu kept quiet. The heads of the FSB and other spook outfits remained, as is their wont, in the shadows.

But Vikor Zolotov, the head of Russia’s national guard, was beaming with self-importance as he fielded questions from reporters in the Kremlin. No, he said, the mutineers would never have taken Moscow. Yes, we had advance intelligence of the plot. Importantly, he added, the mutiny had exposed weaknesses in his force that would now be addressed.

“We have artillery and mortars, we have combat helicopters but we don’t have tanks and other long-range heavy weapons. We will introduce them into the force,” he said.

Although his men were deployed – disastrously – to Ukraine in the early stages of the war, Zolotov’s real job is putting down internal insurrection.

He commands some 200,000 men and answers not to the ministry of defence, nor the FSB, or even the interior ministry, but to Putin himself. With tanks, the Rosgvardia as it is known, will now make the final leap from internal security force to proper army – and thus a potential power broker.

Zolotov, an old St Petersburg bodyguard of the president, is often ridiculed by observers as slightly dim – a prime example of Putin’s habit of promoting loyalty over ability. “A good bodyguard just doesn’t necessarily make a good commander,” says Petrov, before explaining Zolotov’s rise to high office. “One of the things we often don’t know is the reason – possibly some incident in the 1990s – Vladimir Putin decides he trusts someone absolutely.” Today, Zolotov is not to be discounted. “He is foolish, but he’s not an idiot.”

And he is only one of several former bodyguards of Putin moved to prominent roles in a 2016 reshuffle. Others include Alexey Dyumin, the governor of Tula region and, chattering classes of Moscow say, a rising star to watch. The bodyguards, however, are unlikely to mutiny.

“The plan, as far as we can reconstruct it, was to give those officers who were absolutely unknown to the general public some experience as public politicians and civilian managers, and later use them to head big and powerful corporations,” says Petrov. Dyumin, he guesses, is being groomed for Shoigu’s job. “They are like Putin’s children. Without him they have no prospects at all.”

The 46-year-old head of Chechnya is the supreme Putin loyalist, who was one of the first prominent officials publicly to denounce Wagner’s insurrection and dispatch troops to deal with them.

However – now that Prigozhin is off the scene – he is also the nearest thing Russia has to an independent warlord. Fears about his long-term ambitions long pre-date the war in Ukraine.

Like Prigozhin, Kadyrov is a monster of Putin’s own creation. As long as he keeps Chechnya quiet, inside the Russian Federation, and loyal to the president, the Kremlin allows him to run the republic as an autonomous personal fiefdom.

He gets to murder with impunity at home and overseas and – uniquely among Russia’s tightly controlled regional leaders – maintains a private army.

The A A Kadyrov 141st Special Motorised Regiment, named after Ramzan’s deceased father Akhmat, is technically part of the Russian national guard under Viktor Zolotov. In reality, it is made up of Chechen Kadyrov loyalists, and answers exclusively to the Chechen leader.

The same goes for its sister battalion the 249th South,  the “Akhmat” Special Rapid Response Unit, the “Akhmat-Grozny Special Purpose Mobile Unit” and the “A A Kadyrov” Special Purpose Police Regiment.

In June, Kadyrov announced he would raise four more ethnic Chechen battalions to fight in Ukraine. In all, he probably commands in excess of 10,000 men.

If Putin dies or is severely weakened, Kadyrov’s loyalty may be tested. Some in Moscow, especially in the FSB, believe another Chechen rebellion is eventually inevitable.

Rumour has it he also maintains a heavily armed contingent at one of central Moscow’s larger hotels, an insurance policy to protect his interests in the capital.

In the event of Putin vanishing, they could act quickly – if not to install Kadyrov himself, then in favour of whichever faction or individual he chooses to back.

He is clearly strategic in his thinking. In Ukraine, his troops have been ridiculed as “TikTok” soldiers because of their fondness for self-promoting social media videos and a strange knack for avoiding any actual fighting.

But there is rationale for that, explains Galeotti: “Kadyrov is actually very careful with his fighters. These are the guys who ultimately keep him in power at home. So does he want them to go and die in Ukraine?”

They would also be outnumbered by the army, the FSB, and other parts of the national guard – and Kadyrov is universally feared and disliked.

Petrov is not sure that matters. “Prigozhin himself, even at the height of his popularity, wasn’t loved by the majority of Russians. Neither was Stalin when he began to take power. If there is a person who is decisive enough and capable enough to take power, it is another question to use state controlled media to make them popular.

“What the Wagner mutiny has demonstrated is that in an intra-elite fight, it is not necessarily the biggest military force that will dominate but the fastest one.”

Putin’s system of government depends on managed rivalries, and for 23 years it has served him well.

Dissent by one is meant to be nipped in the bud by enemies who prefer the status quo. All understand that none of them could ever replace Putin in the current system, so it makes sense to keep him there.

Last weekend, the system worked – but slowly, imperfectly, and at the expense of exposing fundamental weaknesses. The question, says Galeotti, is how it will respond when the next thing goes wrong.

“It could be a dramatic collapse at the front, and Ukrainian troops entering Crimea. Perhaps Vladimir Putin will be taken seriously ill and is unable to govern. It could be a cascading crisis that spreads from region to region,” he says.

“There is a whole range of black swans that could come fluttering over the Kremlin. The point is not what the crisis will be, but that there will be a crisis.”

Most Russia watchers believe Putin’s demise will combine elements of farce and tragedy, like an Armando Iannucci screenplay, rather than resemble a carefully planned coup. As after the death of Stalin, when the tipping point comes for Putin, Russia’s surviving power brokers – Bortnikov, Shoigu, Zolotov and Kadyrov included – will try to hammer out some kind of deal.

Oddly, its true beneficiaries may not be any of the strongmen listed above. Under the Russian constitution it is Mikail Mishustin, the Russian prime minister, who would automatically step in as acting president if Putin dies or is incapacitated.

He does not command the personal loyalty of any army. But he is in charge of Russia’s civilian bureaucracy, and none of the men with guns could hope to rule without him.

But what if, cometh the hour, Patrushev sends a secret signal to FSB officers and the other strongmen’s families are at that moment being arrested? And what if Zolotov has ordered his men to do the same? Or if, meanwhile, Kadyrov has told his men to grab the Kremlin and Ostankino television tower?

And there are other wild cards. Prigozhin and his Wagner mutineers are defeated, but still at large. Smaller private military companies are knocking around the battlefields of Ukraine. Radical nationalists like Igor Strelkov, the former FSB colonel who led the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, have barely concealed dreams of profiting from 1917-style chaos at home. They could wield influence if they could muster a “Freikorps” of armed supporters returning from the front.

The Ukrainian intelligence services are currently backing two militant Russian groups raiding the Belgorod region. One, the Russian Volunteer Corps, is led by an unabashed neo-Nazi. The other, the Russia Freedom Legion, is made up of deserters and prisoners of war fed up with the current regime. They, too, may have plans in post-Putin Russia. And Khodorkovsky may be right – Russia’s marginalised liberals do not have an army. But they should not be discounted entirely.

Imagine, says Gabuev, that when Putin disappears “there is so much repressed ill-feeling that we see mass protests in Moscow for free elections”. “Imagine they stay on the street and don’t just go home. Imagine there is no firm order to shoot them, so more people arrive when they realise it is safe.” That is a lot of ifs. But revolution could be closer than we think.

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