Sergey Ivanov spent decades as Putin’s most trusted man and then watched as that trust became a cage
In early February, Vladimir Putin relieved Sergey Ivanov of his duties as the president’s special envoy for environmental matters. Ivanov, 73, is one of Putin’s oldest and closest allies — the two served together in the KGB in Leningrad. After Putin rose to power, Ivanov held some of the most senior positions in the Russian government, serving at various times as secretary of the Security Council, defense minister, deputy prime minister, and chief of the presidential administration. He was even considered a contender in the 2008 presidential race, but Putin chose Dmitry Medvedev as his temporary successor. Ivanov largely withdrew from active politics in 2016 and has now, a decade later, stepped down entirely. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev looks back at the defining moments in the career of a core member of Putin’s inner circle.
Rising with Putin
In 2000, the newspaper Kommersant asked Vladimir Putin — who at that point was still just the acting president — whose advice he valued and whom he trusted. “Trust?” Putin answered. “Sergey Ivanov, the Security Council secretary. There’s such a thing as the sense of having someone at your side. That’s the feeling I get with Ivanov.” The two had known each other since the KGB, where they occupied adjacent rooms in the same office. Ivanov himself recounted the story to President George W. Bush during Bush’s 2002 visit to St. Petersburg. At the time, Ivanov was Russia’s minister of defense.
Ivanov recalled the encounter in a 2016 interview with TASS:
We were on a boat excursion along the Neva. We stood on deck, and I pointed to the famous “Big House” on Liteiny Prospekt — formerly the seat of the KGB’s Leningrad directorate, now occupied by the St. Petersburg FSB. I said, “Do you see that window on the seventh floor? Behind it is the office where Putin and I began our professional lives as young case officers.”
Unlike Putin, who left the intelligence world after the Soviet collapse and entered civilian government — serving as an aide and then deputy to St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak — Ivanov remained in the intelligence service. By 1998, he had risen to the position of deputy head of the European Department of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.
That same year, Putin was appointed head of the Federal Security Service and invited his old comrade to join him as his deputy. From that moment forward, Ivanov’s career advanced in tandem with Putin’s successive promotions. When Putin became prime minister in 1999, he elevated Ivanov to secretary of the Security Council, and in 2001, after ascending to the presidency, he named him minister of defense.
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The Defense Ministry appointment
Kommersant reported at the time that Ivanov’s appointment to the Defense Ministry had been discussed since mid-2000. The country’s leadership, the newspaper reported, sought to resolve tensions between the Defense Ministry and the General Staff. In 2000, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev and the chief of the General Staff, Anatoly Kvashnin, had clashed over possible paths for military reform. Kvashnin, who made no secret of his designs on Sergeyev’s job, warned that Russia’s military was in a critical state. He demanded cutbacks in the combat strength of its nuclear deterrence forces and reinforcements for its conventional forces. Putin, however, sided with Sergeyev, who opposed the initiative.
In the end, Putin decided to place a “civilian official” at the head of the ministry. Ivanov had retired from active intelligence duty before the appointment, which made him — at least on paper — a civilian. “You can’t have someone from intelligence running the military if they’re still actively working for the intelligence services — I don’t mean someone who used to work there, I mean someone who’s still on the payroll,” Ivanov later explained. “There are written and unwritten rules, a certain code that governs relations between representatives of different services and branches of the military. It’s hard to describe it to a civilian.”
There was, moreover, a second rationale. According to Kommersant, Putin installed Ivanov specifically to carry out “painful” reforms in the military, above all, the reduction of 350,000 personnel. At the time, the Russian armed forces numbered more than 1 million. (For comparison: Russia’s armed forces numbered 1.5 million service members by December 1, 2024, after nearly three years of full-scale war in Ukraine.) “Sergey Ivanov is the only official — apart from Vladimir Putin himself — with enough political clout to overcome the resistance to the troop reductions that are coming,” Kommersant reported.
Reforming Russia’s military
Ivanov moved quickly to bring order to the ministry. He put the personnel directorate under Nikolai Pankov, another intelligence veteran and close associate. In 2003, the newly created office of the minister’s staff was headed by yet another former security officer, Andrey Chobotov. In addition to reducing the size of the military, Ivanov worked to shift it to an all-volunteer force (a process that was never completed).
Kommersant’s 2003 reporting described the “large and deeply unwelcome surprise” of the many problems facing Defense Minister Ivanov. In February 2002, an An-26 military transport plane crashed near Arkhangelsk, killing 17 people. That same month, a Su-34 fighter jet went down near Pskov. And in June 2002, eight conscript soldiers deserted from Russia’s peacekeeping force in South Ossetia. In other words, the military badly needed modernization and serious reform. “Sergey Ivanov now concedes that he has not achieved major successes in military reform,” the paper wrote (though Ivanov never said so publicly).
It was also at this time that Kommersant reported Ivanov was a potential successor to Putin in the 2008 presidential election. The defense minister did, in fact, receive a substantial promotion—first to deputy prime minister in 2005 (while retaining his position at the Defense Ministry), and then, two years later, to first deputy prime minister (at which point Anatoly Serdyukov assumed leadership of the Defense Ministry).
Ivanov managed to cut mandatory military service from two years to 18 months, and in 2008, as he had planned, it was reduced to one year. Russia’s defense budget grew from 214 billion rubles in 2001 to 821 billion rubles in 2007. But even as spending increased, media reports about brutal hazing in the military — known as dedovshchina — continued to surface regularly.
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The succession race
Ultimately, however, Ivanov did not become Putin’s successor. He was competing for the nomination against another deputy prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, the former presidential chief of staff who had been overseeing national priority projects since the early 2000s. (These grand federal initiatives to raise Russians’ quality of life continue to this day.) Both candidates received considerable media attention; Kremlin-friendly outlets chronicled their work in meticulous detail. But the ultimate decision lay with the president, and his choice fell on Medvedev — even though Ivanov’s approval ratings were higher. (According to polling by the Levada Center in July 2007, the figures were 37 percent for Ivanov and 29 percent for Medvedev.)
Ivanov was sabotaged by his own popularity, the business daily Vedomosti argued at the time. Here is how the newspaper explained Putin’s choice of Medvedev:
The former presidential chief of staff was chosen as successor because he looked, at first glance, like the weakest of the possible candidates. Unlike other Putin loyalists, Medvedev had always been a step or two below Putin on the career ladder. Medvedev had not undergone the harsh political apprenticeship that Putin himself had experienced — the kind that now enables the current president to chart an independent political course. That Medvedev is “not a fighter” came through during the succession race.
In other words, Putin understood that Medvedev would cede the presidency back to him in 2012. With Ivanov, there was no such certainty. “He believed that Sergey would not give power back,” one of Ivanov’s acquaintances told Roman Badanin and Mikhail Rubin, authors of The Tsar in Person. (Badanin is the editor-in-chief of the investigative outlet Proekt; Rubin is his deputy.) The same source claimed that Putin was troubled by Ivanov’s good standing with the American authorities. (Ivanov himself had alluded to his ongoing contact with leaders in the U.S. government.)
Still in Putin’s favor
Losing the succession race, however, did not mean Ivanov’s disgrace. In Prime Minister Putin’s government, he became deputy prime minister and assumed oversight of Russia’s defense sector and industry. In 2011, after Putin and Medvedev announced at a United Russia party congress that they would exchange roles, Ivanov was named the president’s chief of staff — a role he retained after Putin’s electoral victory in March 2012. In that capacity, according to The Insider, Ivanov became the main patron of Kirill Dmitriev (now the Kremlin’s principal negotiator with Washington on the war in Ukraine), helping him secure leadership of the Russian Direct Investment Fund.
A former official who served on the presidential administration’s domestic policy team in the early 2000s told Meduza that Ivanov had a tense relationship with Vyacheslav Volodin, who led the team at the time. “Volodin acted like he was the real boss of the presidential administration and Ivanov wasn’t his superior,” the source explained. “The head of the political directorate does report directly to the president, but you still have to respect the chain of command. Volodin wasn’t too interested in doing that.”
Like other members of Putin’s inner circle, Ivanov used his influence to secure top jobs for his children at state corporations and large government-linked companies. His older son, Alexander, served as deputy chairman of Vnesheconombank, while his younger son, Sergey, became the general director of the diamond-mining enterprise Alrosa. Alexander died in 2014, drowning while on vacation in the United Arab Emirates. Sergey remains at Alrosa, now as deputy chairman of the supervisory board.
After losing a son, Sergey Ivanov “withdrew inward and lost interest in his work,” said a Meduza source who worked at the presidential administration in the 2010s. According to the news outlet Agentstvo, Ivanov also started having health problems around that time. He reportedly began dropping hints to Putin that he wanted out of his job as chief of staff — a wish the president granted in 2016.
“I remember well that you asked not to remain in this role for more than four years, and I appreciate your desire to move on to other work,” Putin said during a one-on-one meeting with Ivanov after his departure.
The final years
In exchange, Ivanov was made a special envoy for environmental affairs. He devoted himself to protecting Amur tigers and regularly advocated restrictions on tourist traffic to Lake Baikal (albeit without success). From time to time, he spoke nostalgically in press interviews.
At the same time, Ivanov retained his position on Russia’s Security Council — and with it, direct access to Putin. In 2023, he declared his support for the war against Ukraine. “I believe in the success of the operation. I believe that our armed forces will advance on the battlefield. I wish them success, and I shall aid our army however I can, within my modest abilities,” he said in a broadcast on the television network Rossiya-24.
Two sources close to the presidential administration told Meduza that Ivanov exited his sinecure because of health problems and age. One source said Ivanov’s departure is nothing like the resignation of Dmitry Kozak, who left the Kremlin last September after years of resistance to the invasion of Ukraine and after losing influence to First Deputy Chief of Staff Sergey Kiriyenko. “There’s no hidden backstory here, like there was with Kozak,” the source explained. “This is about age and health.”
Story by Andrey Pertsev
Translation by Kevin Rothrock