Putin's potential successors

The head of the Wagner mercenary army, Yevgeny Prigozhin, recently led his forces to capture the military headquarters in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don before turning his convoy toward Moscow, only to abruptly halt the advance. He then reportedly agreed to go to Belarus in exchange for all charges against him stemming from the rebellion being dropped. The bizarre series of events shook Russian strongman Vladimir Putin's hold on power, which is thought to have been weakened by the country's barbaric and increasingly disastrous invasion of Ukraine.

Today, Putin remains in power, but Prigozhin's aborted coup was a reminder that his reign can't last forever. "Here's the bottom line: even if it is now snuffed out, an alternative was allowed to arise," historian Stephen Kotkin told Foreign Affairs. Who are the leading alternatives to replace Putin as president of the Russian Federation?

Dmitry Medyedev

Medyedev served four years as Russia's president from 2008 to 2012 before stepping aside for Putin as part of what was later revealed to be a prearranged agreement. The Leningrad native and former law professor is perhaps Putin's longest-standing ally, and he stepped into the subordinate role of Prime Minister from 2012 to 2020. Now the deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, Medyedev has struck a belligerent tone about the war in Ukraine. He recently said of the Ukraine conflict that "this conflict will last for a very long time. For decades, probably," and has threatened a preemptive nuclear strike if Ukraine were to try to acquire its own nuclear stockpile. Questions, however, remain about whether someone who has been so subservient to Putin for so long could take or consolidate power. The Spectator's Mark Galeotti recounts a joke purportedly making the rounds in Moscow, about Medyedev looking for the steering wheel in a car and Putin pulling out a remote control from the passenger seat and announcing he'll be the one driving.

Sergei Kiriyenko

Putin's 60-year-old first deputy chief of staff is a jack-of-all-trades who was most recently given the job of managing the sham referenda in the regions Russia seized from Ukraine in 2022. In the 1990s, Kiriyenko was known as a liberal reformer, so much so that then-President Boris Yeltsin made him the country's youngest-ever prime minister in 1998. Unfortunately, Kiriyenko's tenure coincided with the country's worst post-Soviet financial crisis and he was forced to step down after four months. During his brief turn in office, Kiriyenko made the fateful decision to appoint Putin as the head of the FSB, the successor institution to the KGB. As a Putin inner-circler, Kiriyenko would likely only get the top job if the succession process was managed by Putin or his allies.

Alexei Dyumin

Dyumin, 50, cut his teeth as Putin's bodyguard in the 1990s, before rising to play various roles inside the Russian state, including deputy director of the military intelligence bureau GRU and now governor of Tula Oblast. Dyumin was instrumental in spiriting pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych out of the country in 2014 after a pro-democracy uprising in Kyiv, and then served as a special forces commander in the successful operation to seize Crimea from Ukraine. Once a deputy to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, Dyumin has been the subject of extensive rumors in recent days that he will take his former boss's place. Dyumin's rise to power is emblematic of how Putin operates, identifying allies and then shuffling them from one position of authority to another inside the sprawling Russian state. In 2016 Galeotti described "a creeping process" in which Putin's allies, including bodyguards, "start getting appointed to key positions."

Nikolai Petrushev

The secretary of Russia's Security Council, Petrushev is a leading proponent of the idea that there is a Western conspiracy to weaken or possibly break up the Russian Federation. The 71-year-old has known Putin since they worked together in the KGB, and was a major strategist in both the 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine. Last year Tatiana Stanovaya told The Washington Post that "His ideas form the foundations of decisions taken by Putin. He is one of the few figures Putin listens to." In a March 2023 interview with Rossiskaya Gazetta, Petrushev said that "Washington and London are again conniving with Nazism and fascism. They have no qualms about using Ukraine to set Europe or the entire world ablaze in a belief that they can get away with anything." Over the past year, Petrushev has traveled widely seeking to shore up Russia's diplomatic position, and has played a critical role in managing the alliance with China. Petrushev's 45-year-old son Dmitry, currently the agriculture minister, has also been a rumored Putin successor.

Mikhail Mishustin

Russia's 57-year-old prime minister would be a logical choice as successor, and not only because he would become the interim president should Putin step away before his term ends. An economist by training, Mishustin spent a decade as head of the country's tax bureau before his appointment as prime minister in 2020. Mishustin has been muted about the Ukraine war, and focused largely on containing the fallout from Western sanctions placed on Russia since the February 2022 war began, but he was reportedly opposed to Putin's decision to invade. That might make him well-placed to keep the basic structures of the Russian authoritarian regime intact while making a strategic retreat or settling on less favorable terms than Putin has been willing to countenance.

Other possibilities

Given the humiliating trajectory of the Ukraine war, Shoigu is an unlikely but not impossible choice to lead Russia. There is, of course, Prigozhin himself, although the odd denouement to last weekend's putsch may have dimmed his star as much as it did Putin's. Moscow's long-time Mayor Sergei Sobyanan has long been a rumored successor. There is also Dmitry Kozak, a former deputy prime minister and now Kremlin chief of staff who reportedly had worked out an agreement with Ukraine prior to the war that Putin rejected. In the event of a full rupture of the regime itself, of course, the list of possibilities would not be limited to Putin loyalists and other Kremlin insiders. Jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny would be the most prominent politician who might seek to lead a post-Putin Russia. Putin has had other opposition leaders, like Boris Nemtsov, assassinated, but others, like tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, live in exile.

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