Former British intelligence Chief Richard Dearlove predicts that Russian President Vladimir Putin will lose power next year. He stated this during the One Solution podcast, Insider reports.
The intelligence officer believes that next year Putin will go to a sanatorium for treatment, which he will leave, no longer being the president of Russia. He assumes that Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, will take Putin's place.
Patrushev is included into the inner circle of Putin's trusted people. Bloomberg journalists found out that Putin made the decision to attack Ukraine in February 2022 together with some officials, and Patrushev was among them.
Dearlove's forecast is consistent with statements that Putin is "sick with blood cancer." An unnamed Russian oligarch claimed that Putin had back surgery related to blood cancer shortly before Feb. 24. Earlier, Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, also said that Putin was seriously ill.
Context. Earlier it was reported that during the three months of the war in Ukraine, the President of Russia had alienated both the "party of war" and those who want peace — the Kremlin hopes that "in the near future" he will leave, and they are already looking for a successor.
The Kremlin even discusses the figures of the president's successors behind the scenes. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, Deputy Chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev, and First Deputy Chairman of the Presidential Administration Sergei Kiriyenko, who recently became the Kremlin curator of Donbas, are among them.
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