October 27, 2026
Vadym Denysenko, head of the analytical center Dilova Stolytsya, spoke with Radio NV on Oct. 25 about how and why Russia’s FSB Federal Security Service could topple dictator Vladimir Putin, and which diplomatic advantage Ukraine failed to exploit.
Radio NV: Putin has again canceled his address to the Federal Assembly. The speech is required by the Russian Constitution, yet it will not take place this year, just as it did not in 2022. Does the decision to cancel an official address suggest he cannot find explanations for issues he cannot ignore? How should we view this?
Vadym Denysenko: First, we should be honest: he is simply tired of these performances. They no longer interest him; he sees no larger purpose in them. In recent years he has skipped the annual address to parliament fairly often.
Second, he will almost certainly prepare the address only when it becomes clear where the war of attrition is heading and where the current diplomatic efforts to lift sanctions on Russia are going.
If he concludes that the Europeans are prepared to ease sanctions and that the war of attrition is forcing Ukraine to accept certain proposals on withdrawing forces from the Donbas, then he will deliver the speech.
If not, he has little of substance to say in a major address right now. He does not want to talk again about milk yields and fat content. And at this moment he cannot claim victory. So he simply decides not to do it.
You believe a behind-the-scenes war among the Russian elites has intensified. It can even be placed on a single timeline: the deputy head of the Federal Tax Service’s electronic document-management directorate was detained, and one of the tax service’s data centers was recently hit by something from Ukraine. I don’t know whether the two events are connected or merely coincided in time. But you write that a new, essentially backroom battle has opened between the so-called bureaucrats and the FSB officers, who themselves are not monolithic. What should we take from this?
First, I do not link the Ukrainian drone strike on the Russian tax service data centers with the arrests.
But here is the situation we now face. The Russian government is being somewhat reconfigured, and the key change is that Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has lost his most important figure — essentially his only reliable ally, Dmitry Grigorenko, who was a deputy prime minister and chief of the government staff.
In Russia, the chief-of-staff holds very substantial powers, ranging from expert review to control over the entire flow of government documents.
Mishustin has been forced to accept an outsider as chief-of-staff. Anyone who understands bureaucracy knows how serious a blow that is.
Immediately afterward, arrests began inside the Federal Tax Service. Those arrests are linked to people close to Grigorenko.
Mishustin himself, it is worth recalling, comes from the tax service. He rose to head the government from that institution.
Over the past six to nine months we have seen fairly serious pressure — first on the circle of Sergei Kiriyenko, one of the main pillars of the technocratic-bureaucratic vertical, and now the beginning of pressure on Mishustin himself, who is probably the chief pillar of that vertical.
It is important to explain why this matters.
In 2016, Putin decided to stop building an FSB-dominated state. Few people in Ukraine know this, but Russia ceased to be an FSB country after 2016. From that point a second vertical was constructed alongside the FSB: a vertical of technocrats and bureaucrats.
It was built. It proved highly effective. And, unfortunately, it was thanks to that vertical that Russia withstood the sanctions pressure in 2022. Had only the FSB vertical existed, there is little doubt Russia would have collapsed economically in 2022–2023.
Beginning in 2025, however, Putin has been moving away from the technocratic vertical and returning to the FSB vertical. There are various reasons. In brief, after the 2024 elections, and especially in 2025, a turn back toward the FSB began. Today the two key pillars of the bureaucratic vertical — Kiriyenko and Mishustin — are under attack.
That does not mean Mishustin and Kiriyenko will be removed tomorrow. But their entourages are under very serious pressure. Clearly some members of those circles are beginning to give evidence against their bosses. In essence, the FSB has moved into a fairly serious counteroffensive against this vertical.
We can therefore speak of a sharp strengthening of the FSB’s role in the Russian Federation in recent years. And all of this is occurring against the background of a three-way power structure inside the FSB itself, because the service is not monolithic. There are currently three verticals: that of FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov, that of First Deputy Director Sergei Korolev, and that of the head of military counterintelligence, Ivan Tkachev — a man of Rosneft chief Igor Sechin.
The main political event in Russia awaits us in November: Putin’s decision on whether to extend Bortnikov’s term as FSB director. Bortnikov turns 75, a critical age. Either Putin extends him for another year, or he appoints someone new. Much will depend on that decision regarding how the FSB functions in the coming years.
You also believe the main change is the strengthening of the FSB, which now has every chance of reclaiming the system of governance for itself — but that if they succeed, their next victim will be Putin himself. Why? Why would FSB officers who regain full power in Russia suddenly want to remove Putin?
The logic of any such system is expansion. In this case they cannot remain confined to a stall, inside a vertical. Especially after being held in that stall for ten years, and on a fairly short leash.
If Bortnikov is indeed removed, if someone comparatively young (around 60) becomes FSB director, and if that person understands he has obtained full power, sooner or later he will reach the conclusion that the primary obstacle to their further development is Vladimir Putin.
Both the elites and the security services understand this. I am not saying it will happen tomorrow. But if a sufficient number of different factors coincide, I consider the probability of such a scenario quite high.
Could it resemble August 19, 1991 — the State Committee on the State of Emergency, a putsch, that whole story?
I would put more stock in the story of how an ambulance could not reach Stalin for several hours. I think we should be thinking more along those lines.
A humanitarian operation is supposed to take place; people may be evacuated from occupied Oleshky; a local ceasefire has been agreed. U.S. President Donald Trump said this was an achievement of his wife, Melania Trump. Why, from your perspective, did Putin agree to this “humanitarianism”?
He understands perfectly how important a communication channel Melania Trump can be.
I would like to step away from Oleshky for a moment and go back several months, when Ukraine was the first to propose a humanitarian mission for Melania Trump. It was highly successful and genuinely marked a major breakthrough in Ukrainian-American relations; it even improved relations between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Trump.
Unfortunately, we treated it as a one-move combination and afterward somehow forgot that we possessed such a trump card — the communication channel through Melania Trump. Squandering it was a major strategic error by Ukrainian diplomacy.
The Russians have now realized they can use that same card in their own interests. They chose not to listen to the Pope, who had also asked for this, but to listen to Melania Trump. In effect they played the combination that we ourselves could have played. From my point of view, I repeat, this was a colossal mistake by Ukrainian diplomacy.
Is this war about saving Ukraine or removing putin? Asking for a friend…
Saving Ukraine. putin is just another skin from the east, as was Stalin, Lenin and Peter II.
Both.