A former Defense minister, he first met Putin when they trained together as aspiring spies at a KGB academy in the late 1970s.
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Vayno, 44, the new Kremlin chief of staff, has worked in Putin’s protocol department and was recently Ivanov’s deputy.
Ivanov also lost his spot on Russia’s Security Council, the powerful body that deals with matters of national security and is thought to play a crucial role in Putin’s decision-making.
President Putin simultaneously appointed a new chief of staff, naming Anton Vaino to the post. Sergei Ivanov was considered as a possible successor to President Putin. Mr Putin at the time was prime minister.
The position has also springboarded the likes of Sergey Naryshkin to new heights as he moved on to head the lower house of parliament, after serving three years as chief of staff before Ivanov’s arrival and Putin’s return to the Kremlin.
“I remember well our agreement about the fact you had asked not to be in this area of work as the head of the presidential administration for more than four years”, Mr Putin said in a meeting with Mr Ivanov and Mr Vaino broadcast on state television.
Unsatisfied with the current relations between their states, Russian President Vladimir Putin and British Prime Minister Theresa May have agreed to meet in “the near future”, the Kremlin said yesterday (9 August). Born in Tallinn to a Soviet political family, Vaino is the grandson of Karl Vaino, the first secretary of the Estonian Communist Party from 1978 to 1988.
Analysts see Ivanov’s dismissal as a court affair apparently rooted in Putin’s attempts to restrain or even remove the old allies he promoted at the dawn of his presidency.
Putin wants to avoid projecting the image of an aging leader, said Moscow-based analyst Alexei Makarkin. “They are steadfastly faithful to him”.
As even State Department spokesmen were obliged to acknowledge, the Russian operation, which the Kremlin cynically described as a humanitarian mission, was little more than a preemptory demand for the opposition’s unconditional surrender that ignored the ongoing United Nations -sponsored political process and violated a Security Council resolution.
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