Little in Anna Tsivileva’s public resume, which includes a stint as a psychiatrist in a mental hospital and selling medical supplies before she became a coal tycoon, suggested Vladimir Putin would appoint her as Russian deputy defence minister earlier this week.
Instead, Tsivileva’s key qualification appears to be an open secret: she is Putin’s first cousin once removed, part of a close-knit family the Russian president rarely acknowledges.
The meteoric rise of Tsivileva, 52, is part of a wave of senior appointments for the children and other close relatives of senior Russian officials following Putin’s re-election in March, which extended his rule until at least 2030.
The prominence of the Kremlin princelings indicates Putin, 71, is making plans to ensure his regime’s longevity even as he puts the country on a war footing to sustain his invasion of Ukraine, analysts say.
“This is about succession — it’s an attempt to hand over power. The new generation of princes and princesses is becoming more prominent,” said Ilya Shumanov, head of Transparency International’s Russia branch.
Tsivileva’s appointment points to Putin’s competing priorities after he put Andrei Belousov, a statist economic official, at the helm of the defence ministry last month and gave him a mandate to track Russia’s ballooning spending on security more closely.
Belousov’s top deputy will be Leonid Gornin, a well-regarded deputy finance minister, indicating the Kremlin does indeed want better control of its resources.
But the need to place the future of Putin’s regime in the trusted hands of Kremlin princelings will clash with his technocrats’ efforts to keep the system afloat, Shumanov said.
“There’s an imbalance when you have too many clans who are there not because of their professional qualities, but because they have the president’s blessing to access financial resources,” he added. “People are in jobs they shouldn’t have.”
Among the lucky few to secure promotions in Putin’s new cabinet in May were Dmitry Patrushev, son of Nikolai Patrushev, the longtime former head of Russia’s security council; and Boris Kovalchuk, son of the banking and media billionaire Yuri Kovalchuk, one of Putin’s closest friends.
Dmitry Patrushev, who had previously spent six years as Russia’s agriculture minister, was elevated to the position of deputy prime minister. The younger Kovalchuk will now run Russia’s audit chamber, a government accountability body.
Several other progeny in Putin’s coterie have been given prominent and highly coveted government or business roles in recent years. Pavel Fradkov, whose father Mikhail is a former prime minister and foreign intelligence chief, was appointed a deputy defence minister alongside Tsivileva on Monday; his older brother Petr runs a major state bank serving the defence industry.
Roman Rotenberg is deputy head of Russia’s ice hockey federation and coaches two of the country’s top teams, all while retaining a senior post at state-run Gazprombank. Earlier this month, Rotenberg — whose billionaire uncle Arkady, a former judo sparring partner of Putin’s, is chair of the federation — said he was against “crony children” in sport.
One former high-ranking Russian government official said the ensconcement of the next generations in such plum roles was all about Putin paying back those who had paved his path to power.
“There are many people to whom he [Putin] owes something,” the person said.
In particular, according to the former official, Putin wanted to reward Nikolai Patrushev, who had pushed the men of the FSB to rally behind Putin when he was first named head of the security service, and Yuri Kovalchuk, whom the US Treasury has called Putin’s “personal banker” and played a key role in convincing him to order the invasion of Ukraine.
The succession of Dmitry Patrushev and Boris Kovalchuk was another part of paying back those debts, the former official said. “The sons are moving up and he agreed to move them.”
Another former senior government official described the rationale as “simple, human, parental feelings”. Or as he put it: “No need to think too much, just take care of the children.”
The nepotistic appointments indicate Russia’s entrenched elite want to secure their position in the longer term, Shumanov said.
“They know Putin doesn’t have an indefinite sell-by date. So the higher they can get, the more chances they have to survive and find a secure place if the system splits,” he added. “That’s why they’re trying to get control of more assets, so they’ll have a stronger bargaining position.”
In a chaotic jostle for valuable assets owned by departing western companies and businesspeople who have fallen foul of the Kremlin, Dmitry Patrushev, 46, has overseen some of the most prominent cases — such as the state’s takeover of Danone and Carlsberg’s Russian businesses last year.
“While he was there [at the ministry], people were nervous,” said one person with repeated dealings with the ministry over the past year. “They felt as if . . . this was a stepping stone for him, and he didn’t want to make any mistakes.”
Putin, the only surviving child of two Leningrad siege survivors, is notoriously tight-lipped about his family.
More recently, however, his two daughters with ex-wife Lyudmila Putina have taken on an increasingly public role. In June, both daughters, Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova, spoke publicly at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum — Russia’s one-time answer to Davos.
Tsivileva, the new deputy defence minister, has also gradually become more comfortable with the spotlight after her husband Sergei became governor of the Kuzbass, a major coal-producing region in Siberia, in 2018, a stepping stone to his appointment as energy minister in May.
Visiting officials were stunned to discover that it was Tsivileva, and not the governor, who was in effect running the region, according to a 2022 article by investigative outlet Proekt that first revealed her family ties to Putin.
Last year, Putin tapped Tsivileva to run a new foundation, Defenders of the Fatherland, to help Russia’s war veterans.
The foundation’s impact appears to have been limited: it spent only Rbs146mn of its Rbs2.5bn budget on “social and charitable support” last year, according to its filings, with Rbs2bn going to salaries and other administrative costs.
But Tsivileva has quickly gone to work. Within two days following her appointment, she travelled to a military hospital in Khabarovsk, in Russia’s far east, posing with servicemen and patients.
Pavel Luzin, a visiting scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, said it was unclear whether Putin had proposed Tsivileva for the position himself, or whether the idea had come from Belousov, who has few pre-existing allies inside the defence ministry.
“I think that Belousov himself suggested Tsivileva, since he needs an additional direct connection with Putin, and he needs a trusted person among the deputies who is not connected to anyone by old personal and departmental connections,” he said.
But Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, said the appointment of Tsivileva and three other new deputy defence ministers this week further emphasised the degree to which Belousov was reliant on the president as he stepped into his new position.
“Over the years in the Putin vertical, Belousov remained a loner,” she noted. “And if you’re a loner, then for deputies they’ll give you the son of the former prime minister and a niece of Putin.”
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