Sergei Ivanov, the former Russian defense minister who came closer than anyone to succeeding Vladimir Putin as president, died June 26 at 73. The Kremlin confirmed his death and gave no cause.
Ivanov and Putin met in the 1970s as KGB officers in Leningrad. When Putin took the FSB directorship in 1998, he named Ivanov his deputy, then appointed him Security Council secretary, then defense minister — the first civilian to hold that post in modern Russian history — a position Ivanov held from 2001 to 2007.
Ivanov was widely considered Putin’s most likely successor. Putin elevated both Ivanov and Dmitry Medvedev to first deputy prime minister ahead of the presidential handover, then chose Medvedev. A close acquaintance of Ivanov’s, speaking anonymously to the Russian outlet Proekt in 2023, said Putin “believed Sergei would not give power back to him.”
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His decline was slow and total. Ivanov served as Kremlin chief of staff from 2011 to 2016, then Putin moved him to a nominal post as special envoy for environmental protection and transport. Putin dismissed him from that role in February 2026 — less than a week after Ivanov turned 73, three years past the standard civil service retirement age. Twelve days later, Putin removed him from the Security Council.
Ivanov died four months after that.
Meduza reported he was rumored to have been suffering from a severe long-term illness. The Kremlin has not confirmed or issued an official cause of death.
His eldest son, Alexander — a deputy chair and board member of Vnesheconombank — drowned while vacationing in the United Arab Emirates in 2014. Ukrainian political commentator Vitaly Portnikov wrote that the loss fundamentally changed Ivanov’s relationship to his work. A man once seen as Russia’s next president, Portnikov wrote, “dies needed by no one.”
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At the televised Security Council meeting in February 2022, where Putin demanded loyalty for the Ukraine invasion, Ivanov did not speak.
The US, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ukraine, and New Zealand all sanctioned Ivanov for his role in Russia’s military aggression. The EU specifically cited his support for recognizing the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Former Russian Central Bank official Sergei Aleksashenko compared Ivanov’s death to the dying-off of Leonid Brezhnev’s inner circle in the Soviet Union’s final years — a generational collapse that preceded the system’s unraveling.
