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Putin Dismisses Chief of Staff in Surprise Move Putin Dismisses a Strong Ally as Chief of Staff in Favor of a ‘Servant’
(about 5 hours later)
MOSCOW — In a move that caught Kremlin-watchers by surprise on Friday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia dismissed his chief of staff, Sergei B. Ivanov, a trusted aide for over four decades. MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin unexpectedly fired his longtime chief of staff on Friday, the latest in a series of high-profile Kremlin changes that have ushered out an older layer of Putin peers and replaced them with a younger generation of unquestioning loyalists.
Mr. Putin announced the decision during a meeting with Mr. Ivanov in the Kremlin. According to the meeting’s transcript, Mr. Ivanov left his post at his own initiative. “Putin is gravitating toward those who serve him, and distancing himself from those who, by virtue of their resources, attempt to rule alongside Putin,” wrote Tatyana Stanovaya, a political scientist, in a recent commentary for the Carnegie Moscow Center. “He does not need advice, he needs people who will carry out his orders with as little fuss as possible.”
“We worked together for many years, and we worked successfully,” Mr. Putin told Mr. Ivanov. “I remember well our agreement, that you have asked me not to keep you in this job of the head of the presidential administration for longer than four years, so I understand your desire to move on.” As if on cue, after the announcement, pictures of Anton E. Vaino, 44, the relatively unknown aide promoted to chief of staff to replace Sergei B. Ivanov, suddenly popped up online. They showed Mr. Vaino shadowing Mr. Putin and even carrying an umbrella to protect the president from the rain.
Mr. Ivanov, who was replaced by his deputy, Anton E. Vaino, was appointed the presidential special representative for environment, ecology and transportation. The changes come amid a spike in foreign and domestic tensions that might arrive as a welcome — or manufactured, as some have suggested — diversion for a nation depressed by a long stretch of economic hardships brought on by the collapse of oil prices and Western economic sanctions for Mr. Putin’s adventures in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
“The presidential administration has existed for 25 years, and I was already its 11th head,” Mr. Ivanov, 63, said to Mr. Putin. “I was surprised to discover that I am the record-holder, working in this post for four years and eight months.” Mr. Putin announced Wednesday that he would respond to what he called a terrorist attack by Ukrainian special forces that killed two Russian soldiers, saying “Certainly, we won’t ignore such things.” (Ukraine’s president dismissed the claims as “absurd and cynical.”) On Friday, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that the new S-400 air defense missile system, which has range of some 250 miles, had been deployed in Crimea.
Over the past several weeks, Mr. Putin has conducted a number of major reshuffles in the Russian government, replacing four regional governors and the head of the Customs Service, and dismissing the country’s ambassador to Ukraine. At home, as the campaign season starts for Sept. 18 parliamentary elections, Mr. Putin is seen as focused on whipping up enthusiasm for his United Russia party.
Mr. Ivanov has known Mr. Putin since the 1970s, when they both started careers in the Soviet spy agency, the K.G.B. At one point, they even shared an office in a K.G.B. building in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. The Kremlin press office first issued a terse statement saying that Mr. Ivanov, 63, was being relieved of his duties. Then state television broadcast a chummy meeting between Mr. Putin, Mr. Ivanov and his successor, Mr. Vaino, who had been Mr. Ivanov’s deputy and formerly worked in the Kremlin’s protocol and media operations.
Once Mr. Putin moved to Moscow and became the head of the Federal Security Service in 1998, Mr. Ivanov became a member of his inner circle. After Mr. Putin ascended to the presidency, Mr. Ivanov held a variety of influential posts, including defense minister and deputy prime minister. Kremlin decisions like this are often opaque. The change was officially cast as a mutual decision initiated by Mr. Ivanov, who instead of acting as one of the most powerful men in the country, shaping the agenda for the presidential administration, will now be a special envoy for transportation and the environment.
Analysts often described Mr. Ivanov as one of the leading members of the security-oriented, conservative camp of the Russian government. He was one of the top candidates to succeed Mr. Putin as president in 2008 but lost out in a bureaucratic battle to Dmitri A. Medvedev, now the prime minister. “I am pleased with your performance in the areas you supervised,” Mr. Putin said to Mr. Ivanov, who like the president is a veteran of the K.G.B., the Soviet-era security service, and worked with Mr. Putin in St. Petersburg in the early 1990s.
A career diplomat, Mr. Vaino, 44, started in the Kremlin in 2003 in a post dealing with Mr. Putin’s ceremonial matters. He moved steadily through the ranks, in 2012 becoming deputy head of the presidential administration, responsible for protocol and public relations. Mr. Putin said the two men had agreed when Mr. Ivanov was appointed chief of staff in late 2011 that he would stay for no more than four years.
Mr. Vaino’s grandfather Karl G. Vaino was the first secretary of the Communist Party of Estonia, from 1978 to 1988. In their staged meeting, Mr. Ivanov seconded that notion, saying that he indeed wanted to move on and thanked the president “for your high regard for the work I have done over the past 17 years.”
Mr. Ivanov, who has a reputation as a hawk, served as defense minister from 2001 to 2007. Considered one of Mr. Putin’s closest allies, he was sometimes mentioned as a possible successor when terms limits forced Mr. Putin to leave office in 2008.
Some viewed Mr. Ivanov as the most recent casualty in what seemed to be an orchestrated plan by Mr. Putin, 63, to install a new generation of “servants” to replace his contemporaries, who might still have had the standing to occasionally question his decisions.
“Sergei Ivanov’s dismissal is a sign of Vladimir Putin’s focus on replacing his old friends at top posts in the executive branch with members of the servant staff, however high-ranking and polished they might be,” said Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst, speaking on Echo of Moscow radio station. “Psychologically, it’s now more comfortable for Putin to deal with just that kind of people — people who from the very beginning look on him as a grand chief and who don’t remember those times when Vladimir Putin wasn’t a grand chief yet.”
The changes started last year with the departure of Vladimir I. Yakunin, the head of Russian railways, who was then so insulted by the low-level rank offered to him in the Federal Council, the upper house of Parliament, that he refused the post. Mr. Putin had long protected Mr. Yakunin despite rumors of rampant corruption, but was reportedly angered by his constant demands for more money for the railroads in a grinding recession
Another old Putin ally from St. Petersburg, Andrei Belyaninov, was forced to resign as the head of the customs office in July, after agents with the F.S.B. state security service searched his house and found hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash stashed in shoe boxes.
In a rare law enforcement battle played out in public, in July the F.S.B. raided the offices of the Investigative Committee, a powerful branch of the prosecutor’s office. Three top officials were arrested and accused of taking bribes, an embarrassment for Alexander Bastrykin, the head of the office and a law school classmate of Mr. Putin’s.
In years past, Mr. Putin’s close associates had been spared such public shaming, but analysts pointed to several reasons for the new treatment.
First, the country has been in recession for two years, and with parliamentary elections coming up Mr. Putin wants to show that his administration is looking out for the general welfare with fresh blood and fresh ideas.
Analysts suggested that Mr. Putin wants to avoid repeating the mistakes of Leonid I. Brezhnev, the head of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982, who is seen as helping cause the country’s collapse by letting the bureaucracy and the country stagnate in tandem.
Mr. Ivanov was also responsible for helping shape the Kremlin’s image, which has not been aided in recent months by unfeeling comments, particularly from Dmitri A. Medvedev, the prime minister.
In one public encounter he suggested that schoolteachers unsatisfied with their pay should go into business, and in another told a retiree in Crimea that there was no money to raise pensions. “There just isn’t any money now,” Mr. Medvedev said, before fleeing the encounter with a cheery, “You hang in there!”
Some analysts suggested that Mr. Putin is provoking a new confrontation with Ukraine to finally resolve the political stalemate in eastern Ukraine in his favor and, given the dismay within the electorate over the economy, to secure votes for his supporters in Parliament and produce a show of national solidarity.
Analysts have also detected another trend in recent appointments, with Mr. Putin naming former bodyguards and intelligence agents to important political posts, such as regional governors.
When Yevgeny Zinichev was appointed acting governor of the Kaliningrad region last month, reporters were surprised to find him in earlier pictures working as the president’s bodyguard.
And when Mr. Putin organized a new, powerful national guard last year answering directly to the president, he promoted a former bodyguard, Viktor V. Zolotov, to the rank of army general and made him the director. The new head of customs, Vladimir Bulavin, worked earlier as deputy chief of the F.S.B.
Mr. Putin, the former head of the F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., was already inclined to trust former bodyguards and members of the agency for their unquestioning loyalty.
That outlook only deepened, given that the wars in Ukraine and Syria have thrust him together more often with advisers from the military and the security services, some analysts pointed out.
“A general from the Ministry of Defense or the F.S.B. will not ask unnecessary questions, or look at Putin through the eyes of a former friend who still expects special treatment,” wrote Ms. Stanovaya of the Carnegie Moscow Center.