Vladimir Putin will soon step down and retire to his £1billion “Bond villain” lair on the Black Sea, according to his former speechwriter.
Abbas Gallyamov, who worked for the Russian leader between 2000 and 2010, says Putin will hand the top job over to a carefully-chosen successor before retiring to his notorious Black Sea palace.
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Gallyamov told the Khodorkovsky Live YouTube channel that Putin will probably not fight the 2024 election and instead seek to give up power to a technocrat successor who could negotiate an end to the war with Ukraine and the West.
Putin’s circle no longer sees him as a “guarantor of stability” and are alarmed by the rise of Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the increasingly powerful Wagner mercenary 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 given 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.”
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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.”
Putin, who has ruled Russia for 23 years, is likely to nominate a trusted underling as president – the Mayor of Moscow Sergey Sobyanin, premier Mikhail Mishustin, and his loyal deputy chief of staff Dmitry Kozak have all been mentioned as possible successors.
“Such people can really win the election,” Gallyamov said. “Yes, then they will have to negotiate with Ukraine, with the West, and break the deadlock within the system."
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For Putin, this is a good option," says Gallyamov, compared with the fates of other former tyrants such as Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu or Libya's General Gaddafi.
“At least Putin will have guarantees of personal security.”
Current laws mean Putin would end his days as a “senator for life” and get the opportunity to end his days peacefully 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 grim Russian jail.
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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”.
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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.
Evidently stung by the revelations, Putin’s oligarch crony Arkady Rotenberg unconvincingly claimed that the palace – guarded by a crack team of Kremlin security specialists – belonged to him rather than Putin.
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