The mechanics here are older than the war: Kremlin power is not one pyramid but several, each anchored to a patron who trades loyalty upward for access to Vladimir Putin. The cast divides into families. The military wing ran for years through Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov. The security men are Nikolai Patrushev, Alexander Bortnikov and Sergei Naryshkin. The political layer holds chief of staff Anton Vaino, former president Dmitry Medvedev and foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. And then there is the money, personified by Yuri Kovalchuk, the oligarch long described as Putin’s “banker”, a man with no government post whose influence over the president is rated as strong as any minister’s. Who holds power is therefore the wrong question. The better one: who still has the president’s ear, and on what terms.
Start with Shoigu, because his arc is the clearest map of how favor works. He ran the emergencies ministry for 12 years before Putin handed him the defense portfolio in 2012, a promotion over the generals that surprised Moscow given his lack of a uniformed background. He earned his standing in Crimea and Syria, shared hunting and fishing holidays with the president, and was once tipped as a possible successor. “If you look at who was serving as a minister in 1999 and is still around, there are only two names: one is Shoigu, the other is Putin,” Dmitry Gorenburg, a Russian political analyst, told Fox News. The war in Ukraine broke the spell: Shoigu lost the defense job in 2024 to Andrei Belousov and now sits as secretary of the Security Council. Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff, a Kazan-born veteran of the second Chechen war, has kept his post; Shoigu once described him as “a military man to the core”. Mark Galeotti’s verdict on the general is blunter: a tough bully.
The siloviki, the security clan, supply the system’s immune response. Patrushev, head of the Security Council, is a KGB contemporary of Putin’s who ran the domestic FSB from 1999 to 2008 before Bortnikov took it over; he has been treated across the Balkans as an unofficial emissary of the Kremlin, and the West sanctioned him in March 2021. Tatiana Stanovaya’s reading of him is clinical: he “every day reports to Putin about hostile American influence or Western influence inside Russia, and how Western secret services are trying to undermine political stability”. Naryshkin runs the foreign intelligence service, the SVR, and also chairs the Russian Historical Society, which in the view of the security-services analyst Andrei Soldatov is no hobby: it “has proved to be very important in providing the president with ideological foundations for his actions”, he wrote. When Naryshkin hedged on live television at the start of the 2022 invasion, Putin cut him off with “Speak clearly, Sergei!” until he answered, “Yes, I support the proposal to recognise its independence,” on recognizing eastern Ukraine.
The civilian layer is thinner than it looks. Vaino, the chief of staff, is under EU sanctions and is regarded as a key gatekeeper of what reaches the president. Medvedev, now deputy chairman of the Security Council, has remade himself as the loudest hawk in the room, declaring that “Russia really does not need diplomatic ties with the West”. Lavrov, in the foreign ministry’s top job since 2004, famously dismissed his exchanges with his then British counterpart as a conversation between a “deaf man and a mute”. None of them owns an independent base; each converts access into status.
Now the stress test. In the spring of 2026, a report attributed to a European intelligence agency that was never named, carried by CNN, the Financial Times and the Riga-based outlet iStories, described a Kremlin that has tightened security around Putin to an unusual degree, driven by fear of assassination, including by drone, and of coup scenarios. One figure stands named in that reporting: Shoigu, cast as a potentially destabilizing actor who retains real power in the military even after losing influence. The purge record around his old empire is already thick: his former deputy Tsalikov was arrested and accused of running a criminal organization that allegedly embezzled state money and took bribes from 2017 to 2024; deputy defense minister Timur Ivanov drew 13 years in 2024; another ex-deputy, Pavel Popov, is serving 19 years; a case against General Bulgakov is still open. Roman Anin, the journalist who founded iStories, argues that Shoigu built exactly the kind of network that frightens the Kremlin: “For many years, Shoigu was the leader of an extremely influential clan,” whose members “adhere to a mafia-like code.” The public tells match the private tightening: the May 9 Victory Day parade was cut back and came close to cancellation, and communications in Moscow have suffered under the electronic-warfare shielding draped over the capital. “When security is the top priority, the safest thing to do is not to appear anywhere,” says the political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, noting that the president’s public appearances have grown rarer.
On closer reading, the sourcing deserves its own audit. The intelligence report is anonymous; no government has owned it. Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter turned analyst, grants that the clans increasingly act on their own, without Kremlin coordination, but reads them as waiting out the war rather than conspiring, and doubts Shoigu’s role is that large, given how far his resources have shrunk. “Security is more important right now than his image,” he says of Putin. Schulmann points out that neither the FT nor CNN actually wrote of any “conspiracy led by Shoigu.” And Galeotti, who heads the Mayak Intelligence consultancy, suspects the story is itself the operation: talk of a coup “may be a deliberate deception.” In the Spectator he called the reporting “suspiciously more like a psyop meant to generate paranoia in the Russian elite than a serious assessment,” in his reading seeded deliberately.
Follow the money and the incentives point away from a coup. That is the case made by Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Central Bank adviser now writing for the Carnegie Politika journal: the elite is no monolith but a set of patronage pyramids, and each patron does better extracting favors from Putin’s attention than he could ever do acting alone. The war and sanctions have shrunk the pot and pushed resources toward the military, so the clans compete harder for the president’s notice and race to prove loyalty. The fight is for a place at the table, not over the table itself, because in Russia property rests on Kremlin goodwill, not on law. That arrangement suits the man at the top, which is rather the point. The one warlord who broke the pattern, Yevgeny Prigozhin with his June 2023 revolt, showed how the exception gets handled. The system holds not because anyone loves it, but because, for now, every calculation in the circle still runs through Putin.
