Russian President Vladimir Putin has appointed Anton Vaino new presidential chief of staff, the Kremlin press service said on August 12.
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Anton Vaino, 44, will replace Ivanov, the Kremlin said in a statement on Friday.
Vladimir Putin said Friday that he was satisfied with the work Sergei Ivanov had done as Kremlin chief of staff and that Ivanov himself had asked to be transferred to a different position.
A reputed friend and former colleague of Putin from their days in the Soviet KGB, Ivanov had always been regarded as one of the Russian president’s closest allies.
“Psychologically, it’s easier for Putin these days to be around the people who always thought of him as the great leader and can not recall the times when Putin was not that great leader”, Belkovsky said on Ekho Moskvy radio.
Many observers had considered Ivanov a leading candidate to take over from Putin as president when his second term ended in 2008.
The Kremlin and Ivanov himself offered little explanation for why he was stepping down. Medvedev was eventually tapped to become president – reportedly because he was seen by Putin as more malleable than the strong-willed Ivanov – who had known the president since his days as a lowly KGB officer and maintained influence among Russia’s security services. “Sergei Ivanov”, the then largely unknown Mr Putin responded.
Ivanov’s replacement, Vaino, previously served as head of protocol in Putin’s administration before becoming Ivanov’s deputy in 2012.
Theresa May has held her first telephone call with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the two leaders could meet face-to-face in China next month, Downing Street has confirmed.
He is part of the famous circle of the “siloviki”, former colleagues and friends of Vladimir Putin in the KGB era.
It was once thought that Mr Ivanov might become president of Russian Federation after Mr Putin’s second term, as a third term for Mr Putin would have been unconstitutional. All are men in their 60s, and all long-time acquaintances of the president.
Today, Ivanov sat silently, seeming at times to be struggling to suppress a smile as Putin accepted his resignation. “They are steadfastly faithful to him”.
Among the most recent appointments made by Putin are former members of his security detail.
As somebody who remembers well the 1970s when the Soviet Union was ruled by Leonid Brezhnev, a party boss in his 70s who at the end of his rule struck Russians as senile and was surrounded by men in their 70s and 80s, Putin wants to avoid projecting the image of an aging leader, said Moscow-based analyst Alexei Makarkin.
Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow contributed to this report.
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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