Sick allies give Putin a succession headache

Tuesday, 2 June 2026

Roger Boyes is diplomatic editor the Times of London.

OPINION: Boris Nemtsov, an anti-corruption campaigner and a former Russian deputy prime minister, was crossing the bridge over the Moskva river in the winter of 2015 when he was shot down and killed. The scene of the crime was only a few minutes' walk from the Kremlin and the message was clear: outspoken critics of Vladimir Putin had lost the right to live.

The assassins were Chechens and the act could be seen as a gift from the ruthless leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, to his patron and protector living behind the Kremlin walls. It was rather like a pet cat dropping a slaughtered trophy mouse at the doorstep of its owners.

That relationship has endured during the long quarter-century of Putin's rule. A brutal pact was struck. The young Kadyrov would succeed his father (blown up in a bomb attack) with Russian backing and hefty subsidies from Moscow in return for turning Chechnya into a bulwark against radical Islamic terror creeping into the imperium.

Chechnya would not be given independence but would enjoy an unprecedented level of autonomy; Kadyrov would be given legal immunity and absolute control over the 1.4 million inhabitants. All Putin demanded was total loyalty so he could sleep easily at night. Kadyrov signed up and now has the Ferrari collection to show for it.

This is the way that Putin manages the imperial periphery. He has reached a similar understanding with Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator. Although Belarus is an independent sovereign state, unlike Chechnya, a similar compact is in place: Russian loans and investment in return for absolute loyalty to Putin. And, as with Chechnya, Belarus has to perform a geopolitical task: to firmly reject any Nato enlargement eastwards, to provide a military staging area for the war against Ukraine, and to undermine Poland, Nato's most muscular forward ally.

Like Kadyrov in the south, Lukashenko in the west can count on Putin's support in crushing opposition and on a flow of cash. Like Bashar al-Assad in Syria they may even count on Russian shelter should they be toppled.

What this means, though, is that their fates are all subtly interlocked. A trickle of rumour has turned into a torrent concerning Kadyrov. He is still only 50 years old but his body is said by intelligence agencies to be giving way. Kadyrov has been missing official meetings in Moscow. Ukraine's HUR intelligence agency suggests he may have recently suffered acute kidney failure. He had the family summoned to a private hospital in Grozny, supposedly to discuss the succession.

Other reports suggest he may have suffered pancreatic necrosis. Long absences are punctuated by heavily edited social media clips of him working or even chairing a meeting. Most telling is the sudden prominence of his sons: Akhmad, 20, is already a deputy prime minister, and 18-year-old Adam is heading Chechnya's security council.

That seems to me (and probably to Putin) a fragile dynastic set-up. Kadyrov's death would almost certainly expose a massive power vacuum in the Caucasus and usher in a contest between armed factions.

For those warlords the stakes are high: control over the US$1 billion of annual subsidies from the Kremlin. The breakdown of order on Russia's southern flank would be the ultimate sign of Putin's weakness. He cannot afford a war in Ukraine and an inevitably bloody operation in Chechnya. Few regions have so consistently opposed enforced Russian statehood, from Tsarist days through the Soviet Union, two bloody wars in Chechnya, and the coercion applied during postwar “pacification”.

The challenges posed by a contested Belarusian succession are different and complex. Again, Lukashenko at 71 is struggling with his health - visibly short of breath, losing his voice, suffering heart muscle inflammation, needing a golf cart to cover short distances and recently cancelling important meetings because of a severe viral infection. And he has been preparing the ground for what he thinks could be an orderly transition, a safety net that will leave him with ultimate veto power and lifelong immunity from prosecution. The idea, presumably, is that if he is incapacitated, he will be able to guide his successor and shield himself against war crimes proceedings.

Why should he be worried about that? Surely he could flee to Moscow? But that is the point: if he gets ousted it will signal that he no longer enjoys the protection of Putin, that the Kremlin leader himself is bleeding power.

There was a telling moment in Ukraine last week when Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed the presence in the hall of the Belarus opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya as the de facto president-in-waiting. It was a recognition that the unholy triad of Putin-Lukashenko-Kadyrov, a blood brotherhood, could soon be coming to an end.

Zelenskyy is upbeat not because the war is going his way - he is fighting Russia to a standstill yet can't stop the aerial attacks on civilians in Ukrainian cities - but because of the clear indications of war fatigue in Moscow.

The FSB is increasingly shutting down the internet so that urban Russia does not spread bad news about Ukrainian drone successes. The talk now is of zastoi, political, economic and social stagnation - a term I last heard in the dying days of Leonid Brezhnev's misrule.

Putin's claim to national respect was that he ended the chaos of the 1990s. Now, facing the slow unravelling of his war before the eyes of his increasingly sceptical citizens, and the erosion of his patronage networks at home and abroad, he seems to be running away from fresh chaos - the sick man of Europe.