Vladimir Putin will this year be forced to select his chosen successor amid military defeats and plummeting popularity, says his former speechwriter.
The dictator will seek to hand over power to a chosen heir and retire to his luxury Black Sea palace rather than risk being ousted.
Putin will seek to give up his grip on power to a technocrat successor who could negotiate an end to the war with Ukraine and the West, and probably not fight the 2024 election, he told the Khodorkovsky Live YouTube channel.
Putin’s circle reportedly no longer view him as a “guarantor of stability”, and are alarmed by the rise of Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the well-armed Wagner private army, which is so far loyal to the Kremlin but could turn on an elite seen as failing in the war, he said.
They fear being slaughtered with his sledgehammer - the extrajudicial punishment dished out to his jail convict soldiers who refuse to fight or seek to defect to Ukraine.
“The apparatus looks at Prigozhin and stops seeing Putin as guarantor of their stability,” he said.
“The whole apparatus sits in horror, looking at Prigozhin and being scared that [his forces] will come after them.
"They personally fear his sledgehammer.”
If Putin seeks nomination for yet another term - he has been president or PM since 1999 - he “might really slip and fail to be elected”.
Gallyamov warned: “He would try to rig the elections, [but it is] fraught with….revolution…
“This is far too big of a risk for the system.”
He is likely to nominate a trusted underling as president - like Mayor of Moscow Sergey Sobyanin, premier Mikhail Mishustin, or his uber-loyalist deputy chief of staff Dmitry Kozak.
“Such people can really win the election,” he said.
“Yes, then they will have to negotiate with Ukraine, with the West, and break the deadlock within the system."
Yet “for Putin, this is a good option, compared with Ceausescu or Gaddafi,” he said, the latter of which was ousted by a NATO intervention in 2011.
“At least Putin will have guarantees of personal security.”
Current laws mean he would be a “senator for life”.
“He will get the opportunity to end his days calmly in [his] palace in Gelendzhik.”
Images of the controversial £1 billion Black Sea pile were revealed by opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, now seriously ill in solitary confinement in a squalid Russian jail.
The palace boasts a vineyard and a “striptease” room known as a “hookah” with a stage and performer’s pole.
It includes a “16-storey underground complex” compared with the lair of a James Bond villain.
It was also described as “a whole anthill in the rock under the house”.
An engineer-turned-whistleblower who reportedly worked on the construction - named only as Viktor - thought of the palace as a “national treasure” suggesting the underground passageways buried in the rock were more ingenious than Dr No’s bunker.
The palace designs included on the eighth subterranean floor "a balcony - literally a loggia hanging over the sea” built into the cliff, from which the owner can enjoy wine tasting from the palace stocks, he said.
In response, Putin’s oligarch crony Arkady Rotenberg claimed unconvincingly that the palace - guarded by Kremlin security operatives - belonged to him rather than Putin.
