Putin promotes Dyumin and younger loyalists to Russia’s politburo

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By Guy Faulconbridge

MOSCOW (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin promoted influential former bodyguard Alexei Dyumin to Russia’s modern-day politburo on Monday, along with a new generation of officials tasked with the functioning of wartime command centres and overseeing the defence industry.

In Putin’s Russia, the Security Council is a key arena for the formulation of decisions on Russia’s most important national security issues, and has been dominated till now by men of the president’s generation, mostly born in the 1950s.

At 52, Dyumin becomes one of the youngest members of the Security Council. According to a decree dated Monday, Putin also appointed Alexander Linets, the 61-year-old head of the Kremlin’s main directorate for special programmes (GUSP), First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov, 55, and Veronika Skvortsova, 63, to the Council.

Putin appointed Dyumin in May to be one of his aides overseeing the defence industry and later that month made him secretary of the advisory State Council, a step that fuelled speculation about his presidential potential.

The GUSP, headed by Linets since 2015, is the secretive successor agency to the Soviet-era directorates which oversaw the functioning of wartime government command centres and coordination. It says it oversees mobilisation for the president, but gives few details.

Linets once served as an officer in the Soviet Union’s interior ministry troops and later in the Federal Security Service (FSB), the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB.

Manturov was promoted to first deputy prime minister in May. He was seated directly to Putin’s left when the Kremlin chief announced changes to Russia’s official nuclear doctrine last week.

Manturov oversees the Russian defence and civilian industry, which has surprised the United States and its European allies by ramping up artillery production faster than the whole of the NATO military alliance combined despite sanctions.

Skvortsova heads the federal medical-biological agency and is a former health minister.

Putin, who turns 72 on Oct. 7, at the same time dismissed Vladimir Yakushev from the Security Council.

AGEING LOYALISTS

The president’s older loyalists include Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu, a former defence minister, who was born in 1955. The Council’s former secretary, Nikolai Patrushev was born in 1951, as was FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov. Both men remain members of the Security Council.

Other younger members of the Security Council, as well as Dyumin, include Putin’s chief of staff Anton Vaino, 52, and Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov, 48.

Dyumin was one of the key people behind the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. In 2015, he was made deputy defence minister and a year later he was elected as governor of Tula region.