Signal or scoop? A European intelligence assessment says Putin fears assassination by his own elite. iStories vouches for it. Meduza’s analyst is less sure.

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A European intelligence report published this week concludes that Vladimir Putin fears assassination by drone — not just from Ukraine, but from inside his own elite. iStories, CNN, and the Financial Times reviewed the document, which also describes a Kremlin in security lockdown and names former Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu as a potential destabilizing force. Meduza’s Vladislav Gorin discussed the report with iStories founder Roman Anin, who vouches for it, and with Meduza political analyst Andrey Pertsev, who warns that its most alarming claims rest on the thinnest evidence.

The report

The intelligence service — an EU member state whose identity the three outlets agreed to protect, confirmed by Anin as not Ukraine — describes a presidency operating under unprecedented security restrictions. Since early 2026, Putin has reportedly stopped visiting his regular residences in the Moscow region and Valdai. He works from “upgraded bunkers,” particularly in Krasnodar Krai, while Russian state media allegedly runs pre-recorded footage. Staff near him cannot use mobile phones. Cooks, photographers, and security personnel have surveillance cameras installed in their homes. The intelligence report describes additional security measures, including the exclusion of State Duma deputies from this year’s Victory Parade.

The document also reconstructs a closed meeting on December 25, 2025, convened the day after a second attack near the site where Russian General Fanil Sarvarov was killed three days earlier. The security elites reportedly blamed each other, with General Staff Chief Valery Gerasimov turning on the intelligence services for failing to stop Ukraine from killing Russian officers on home soil. Putin’s resolution: Federal Protective Service (FSO) guards extended to cover 10 senior generals.

iStories says it independently confirmed several elements of the European report: that the Moscow Internet outages are ordered by the FSO, not the Federal Security Service (FSB) — corroborated by a former FSB officer who had told iStories the same thing weeks earlier; that Putin’s fear of a coup is real, confirmed by multiple sources; and that FSB surveillance capacity has been redirected from criminal investigations to monitoring government officials.

Pertsev is not convinced by the bunker claim. Putin’s public schedule over the past two to three weeks — multiple events per week, with dozens or hundreds of attendees — does not match the picture of a president operating underground. Pertsev acknowledges that Putin does go missing at critical junctures, but he says the current moment is not one of those times.

The Shoigu question

The document names former Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu as a potential destabilizing factor. The proximate cause: the March 5 jailing of Ruslan Tsalikov, Shoigu’s longtime first deputy and closest ally. Anin frames the arrest as a violation of the informal guarantees that have held Putin’s clan system together. Shoigu’s clan, he argues, is a major financial and political force (with Gennady Timchenko among its members) and bound by billions of dollars and years of mutual exposure. When someone like Tsalikov gets arrested, the logic shifts for everyone else, Anin reasons: “If I know I’m no longer protected, then everyone else understands they aren’t either.” He frames the stakes in Hollywood terms: this is Russia’s “Game of Thrones,” he says, where the loser forfeits power, assets, life, and family. That is why the players in these “Hunger Games” have every incentive to act before their rivals do.

Pertsev is skeptical. Shoigu’s clan has been, as he puts it, “steamrolled,” and his people were embedded not in military command but in managing the Defense Ministry’s financial flows (construction contracts, logistics, and procurement). Pertsev points out that Shoigu couldn’t even seat enough loyalists in the Security Council apparatus, where he now serves as secretary. “Who does he have left in the army?” Pertsev asks. “That’s a genuine mystery to me.”

The one substantial figure still associated with the Shoigu orbit — Andrey Vorobyov, governor of the Moscow region — is, by Pertsev’s account, surviving not through old clan solidarity but thanks to cultivated ties to senior administration officials Alexey Dyumin and Dmitry Mironov, both FSO veterans with longstanding links to Moscow regional politics now aligned with a rival camp around National Guard director Viktor Zolotov. The most prominent figure left in Shoigu’s orbit has already drifted away. That leaves the coup scenario resting on hypothetical military loyalists whose identity no one can name. Pertsev also questions the Prigozhin precedent, recalling that even the commander of a mercenary army struggled to mobilize his men when the moment arrived.

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A message for whom exactly?

Anin initially dismisses the suggestion that the leak was designed to send a signal to Putin: “This is not a message. These are facts,” he tells Gorin. But later in the interview, he allows that the European intelligence source likely had a purpose in going public, and one plausible reading, he said, is that the West is telling Putin to “back away while he still has the chance to preserve his life.”

Pertsev also reads the report’s release as a deliberate message to the Kremlin, and says the timing — days before Moscow’s Victory Day Parade — is no accident. “They’re telling him: your throne is slipping away. You know why. Stop fighting.” He adds a structural reservation about the document’s most dramatic claims: if Russian elites were genuinely planning a coup, Western intelligence would be the last to know. And if they did find out, he argues, they would likely stay quiet rather than risk alerting the Kremlin (unless a hardliner worse than Putin were poised to take power).

What to watch

Whether more arrests hit Shoigu’s circle. Whether Putin makes more appearances or withdraws from public view around May 9. And whether the informal elite guarantees ruptured by Tsalikov’s arrest will hold, or whether, as Anin argues, breaking those rules sets off dynamics no one in Moscow can fully control.

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