On June 26, Sergei Ivanov, the former Minister of Defense and the person closest to the presidency in Russia in the 2000s, died. After the 2008 elections, when Putin chose Ivanov’s rival, Dmitry Medvedev, as his successor, he became deputy prime minister and then head of the Kremlin administration. But in 2016, he moved to the position of Special Presidential Representative for Environment and Transport, where Ivanov worked until the winter of 2025. He apparently resigned due to health problems. At Meduza’s request, the Russian who has studied the biography of Sergei Ivanov tells what his life was like and how, despite the massive defeat in 2007, he found his vocation in the rearguard of the civil service.
The fact of the death of 73-year-old Sergei Ivanov was first reported by the basketball league VTB United – he was its honorary president. These details are almost ridiculously accurate for someone who over the past decade has not been involved in the army (in the 2000s, Ivanov was Minister of Defense) and not in domestic politics, but in the Panthers, the environment and sports.
Ivanov’s cause of death has not been announced. Vladimir Putin also conveyed his condolences to the family. In 2000, the future president spoke of the “feeling of comradeship” he felt next to Ivanov.
Seven years later, the Kremlin emerged from a strange battle of successors, which Ivanov won honorably – according to opinion polls and ratings. But then he lost – according to Putin’s final decision.
Ivanov’s biography is always told as that of a failed president. In the summer of 2007, when he was First Deputy Prime Minister, the Levada Center conducted opinion polls ShowAbout a third of Russians will vote for him in the elections – more than his rival Dmitry Medvedev.
Seemingly the confident favourite, Ivanov walked in a casual Western manner – with his jacket undone and his hands in his pockets. He spoke English like no other Kremlin official could, and promised to do so by 2025 for Russia You will become The third aircraft manufacturing power in the world, and the largest per capita GDP Attaining adulthood Up to 30 thousand dollars. But something went wrong in Ivanov’s expectations and in his fate.
Ivanov’s career path has always been linked to the intelligence services. A student at the Leningrad private English school, since childhood he dreamed of seeing the homeland of the Beatles. From the Translation Department of the Faculty of Philology of Leningrad State University, he was actually sent for training at the same Ealing College in London, where Freddie Mercury graduated five years earlier.
After college, people in civilian clothes were already waiting for him. In 1976, Ivanov completed higher KGB courses in Minsk and ended up in the Leningrad Division and the Leningrad Region, where at the age of 23 he met the young Vladimir Putin. In contrast to Putin, who left power in the early 1990s, Ivanov remained in intelligence. When Putin became director of the FSB, his friend in Leningrad was already heading the intelligence department there, and was responsible for the European direction. From there, Putin invited him to become his deputy.
If for Putin Medvedev was more than just an assistant and executor of instructions, Ivanov was described as the first among those whose opinions he listens to.
In 2001, Ivanov became the first civilian defense minister in the country’s history. Experts evaluated the military reform during his reign with restraint – “AC plus”: defense allocations were tripled, the army was reduced by 210 thousand people (relatively painless). At the same time, the transition to contract had stalled, and there was not enough money for housing and salaries for contract workers. Ivanov restored large-scale training and serial rearmament of units, but failed to radically change the army – which his successor Anatoly Serdyukov later did.
It was impossible to silence Ivanov: the minister did not mince his words. He introduced diplomatic impudence even before it became a political trend. In 2002, commenting on Georgia’s attempt to join NATO, he said: “Let them join wherever they want, even if it is the League for Sexual Reforms.”
The language almost destroyed Ivanov during the “case of Andrei Sychev,” a conscript conscript from Chelyabinsk who was paralyzed by hazing, which all the media was talking about in 2006. Ivanov, who was embroiled in the scandal in the mountains of Armenia, brushed off reporters’ questions at a press conference a few days later: “I think there is nothing very serious there, otherwise I would definitely know about it.”
Then the prosecutor’s office close to Igor Sechin, another Putin ally, launched a campaign against the minister. But Ivanov’s patron was more influential than Sechin, and he emerged victorious from the battle.
Interestingly, Ivanov was always considered a security official, but he never belonged to their clan. This is what they called him – “a security officer outside the clans.” Despite his intelligence background, he did not join this wing, which included Igor Sechin, the head of the state anti-drug agency Viktor Ivanov, and Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov; He also stayed away from liberals.
Ivanov was always alone, he didn’t even have his own team. When the question of a successor arose in 2007, and the Kremlin decided to make the deputy prime minister one of the leading candidates, it was the same technology experts and Kremlin PR officials who ensured his political rise, not himself.
Within six months, his rating rose and he overtook his rival Dmitry Medvedev. But they did not influence the voter’s main and only decision. Despite the “feeling of comradeship”, Putin still does not trust his old comrade and prefers a weaker candidate – the candidate who will later return the chair.
A source close to the Kremlin told Meduza at the time: “He was then burned by this situation. He thought he would become president. But the world is not without good people – and they told the administration that Ivanov’s portfolios were already divided.”
Ivanov faced defeat in the race of successors calmly. He remained on Putin’s team. After 2007, the long, and not the most meaningful, part of his career began. Ivanov oversaw the government’s defense industry and was almost invisible. He was remembered in December 2011. Amid protests, Medvedev appointed him head of the Kremlin administration.
Hopes that Ivanov would succeed in bringing together the crumbling apparatus were not justified: his deputy Vyacheslav Volodin was in charge of internal policy, operations were increasingly bypassing Ivanov himself, and as Meduza’s source described at the time: “If the leader is not in the know all the time, they simply stop contacting him.” Putin motive Tigers – Ivanov had his own project, and the animals of the Far East were threatened with extinction Panthers.
According to interviewers, he finally lost interest in the business in 2014, when his eldest son Alexander, Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of Vneshekonombank, died in the Emirates. Ivanov, who was not noted for building personal business empires, promoted his children significantly more than himself: his youngest son Sergei also made a good career – in Alrosa and Sberbank.
In August 2016, Putin relieved Ivanov of leading the administration and replaced him with his deputy, Anton Vaino. The new position – Special Representative of the President for Ecology, Ecology and Transport – was, on the one hand, an honorary pension, taking into account Ivanov’s love for business trips and his reverent attitude towards animals.
But ten years in this post turned out to be surprisingly meaningful. Panthers turned from a private hobby into a state project: Ivanov initiated the creation of a unified national park “Land of the Tiger” in Primorye and became one of the instigators of the declaration of the Year of the Environment in 2017.
He then addressed the topic of “fixing trash,” reiterating that waste is potential revenue. He promised success for this industry, believing in its high technology. He convinced his colleagues that Russia needed to build about 200 processing plants.
On the initiative of Ivanov, the principle “one hectare of cutting – one hectare of cultivation” was incorporated into forest legislation. He also proposed imposing an environmental fee on plastic bags, toughening the penalty for burning grass and imposing fines on unruly people. He also expected that the north-south transport corridor would compete with the Suez Canal.
All of this has not looked like big politics for long, but Ivanov has officially remained in the fold: since 2012, he has been a permanent member of the Security Council. After Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine, he, like almost all of Putin’s circle, was subject to sanctions. In February 2022, the European Union added it to the list, explaining that Ivanov supported the immediate recognition of “self-proclaimed republics.” After that, it ended up on the sanctions lists of Ukraine, the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, Japan and New Zealand.
Ivanov has taken a particular position since 2014, accusing Ukrainians of “ruin” because of their rejection of “traditional values.” By the winter of 2025, his rhetoric was practically no different from that of his former rival in the struggle for Medvedev’s presidency. “There is a struggle between light and darkness, spirituality and soullessness, traditional values and pseudo-liberalism, and then truth and lies,” Ivanov said at a meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Russian Military Historical Society. “There is no doubt that we will prevail, as happened 80 years ago.”
It’s easy to tell Sergei Ivanov’s story as one of defeat, of a man who was one step away from the top — and never got there. But he turned out to be one of the few in Putin’s circle who survived his political death and quietly served another decade — not in disgrace, but no longer in the first circle of an old friend.
Unlike Medvedev, who found no place for himself in militaristic Russia, Ivanov was doing what he truly loved and did not cling to the president’s power and attention for long. He had already lost this battle once and he didn’t want to play on this field anymore.