Are assassins out to kill Vladimir Putin?

Vladimir Putin survived an attempted assassination shortly after ordering the Ukraine invasion, Kyiv’s head of military intelligence has claimed.

Major General Kyrylo Budanov told online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda that “there were attempts to kill Putin” and that the Russian president was “even attacked” recently by “representatives of the Caucasus” region.

The attempted hit “completely failed”, Budanov said, but “it really did happen about two months ago”.

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Hit and miss squad

Western officials have “cast doubts” over Budanov’s claims, wrote the i news site’s political correspondent Richard Vaughan.

Sources have pointed to “the increasingly small circle of contacts the Russian leader allows around him”, Vaughan reported, and “said any such attempt on the Russian leader’s life would be challenging”.

An unnamed official said: “President Putin is operating – and has done through Covid and on an enduring basis – in a smaller and smaller grouping.

“He has fewer contacts, he has fewer public engagements. It’s a more controlled environment around him. So were anyone to attempt to do something like that, it would be a hugely complex operation.”

And despite widespread speculation about his health, the president is also “firmly in control of his inner circle, the country and the decisions that are being made”, the source added.

How far this control extends remains unclear, however.

Budanov did not clarify whether his comment about “representatives of the Caucasus” referred to “Russia’s North Caucasus that saw two separatist wars in the 1990s or the South Caucasus which includes Georgia”, The Telegraph reported.

The Kremlin has not responded to the assassination claims.

Lonely at the top

Whether Putin is really in full control of his inner circle is also a matter of debate. Multiple sources told independent Russian news site Meduza that the president was the focus of growing dissatisfaction, both among those who oppose the Ukraine war and those who back the invasion.

Sources close to his administration told the site that a future without the president was “increasingly being discussed”, with conversations taking place about potential successors “behind the scenes in the Kremlin”.

The discussions reportedly did not extend to plans to “overthrow Putin right now” or to “a conspiracy being prepared”, but “there is an understanding, or a wish, that in a fairly foreseeable future he will not govern the state”.

A source told Meduza that “the president messed up, but then everything can be fixed” to “somehow come to an agreement” with the West and Ukraine.

Favourites to be Putin’s successors allegedly include Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin, Putin ally and former president Dmitry Medvedev, and the first deputy head of the presidential administration, Sergei Kiriyenko.

The talk of discontent within the Kremlin follows the disappearances of a string of key Putin allies from his inner circle,and suggests “something is seriously wrong in Moscow”, said Anders Åslund, a former senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank, in an article for the Kyiv Post.

“The question is not whether Russia is in crisis,” he wrote. It is “how severe the crisis is and whether it is enough to unsettle Putin”.