Anna Nemtsova writes:

Not even the most passionate supporters of Vladimir Putin are pretending that the results of this weekend’s election are in doubt: Putin, Russia’s longest-serving leader since Joseph Stalin, is about to embark on his sixth term. And so, with no electoral politics to debate, both pro-Putin and liberal Kremlinologists in the Russian-language mediasphere have been focusing instead on changes at the very top of Russia’s power pyramid: the new elite that is coming to replace the old Putin cronies, the tensions between the men in military uniforms and those in suits, and the perennial question of who will lead the country in the case of Putin’s sudden death.

Before the war, perhaps the leading candidate for a successor was Putin’s favorite general and then–deputy head of military intelligence, Aleksey Dyumin, who commanded the Special Operations Forces’ top-secret “little green men” during the annexation of Crimea. But his train has departed, as Russians say: “Dyumin’s name was connected to Wagner, which decreased his chance to become Putin’s successor,” a columnist named Andrey Revnivtsev wrote on Tsargrad, a website popular among military and secret agencies, on Monday. Now, according to Revnivtsev, the favored military candidate is a different general, Andrey Mordvichev, who commanded Russian forces in horrific battles in the Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Avidiivka.

That military sources envision a general at the top, and that they disagree on which one, is not surprising. ”The so-called siloviki from the security elite do not stop eating each other alive only because the war goes on,” Ilya Barabanov, an observer of the Russian military and security cadres, told me. [Continue reading…]