Kremlin's Succession Fight Just Exploded - Jason Jay Smart

[TexasTowelie]

Russia's elite crisis no longer looks like a series of separate scandals. It is starting to look like a succession struggle inside the security state, where control over surveillance, money, and force matters more than official rank. The story around Sergei Korolev, Boris Korolev, and X-Holding suggests that a new power network is taking shape around censorship systems, interception tools, and the machinery used to monitor both society and rival elites.

The purge of Ruslan Tsalikov, along with the wider collapse of Sergei Shoigu's old Defense Ministry circle, shows that one patronage network is already losing protection before any formal transition begins. Pro-war nationalist voices are not defending that camp. They want harsher punishment, tougher accountability, and public humiliation. That is a sign that the old military bureaucracy is losing its cover under wartime pressure.

Center 795 matters because the Kremlin is not restoring trust through a single chain of command. It keeps building parallel structures that link the army, the Federal Security Service, and politically connected patrons such as Sergei Chemezov. From the outside, the system still looks strong. Inside, it is becoming more fractured. Succession politics, elite surveillance, Shoigu's weakening network, hardline pressure, and rival armed structures are all colliding inside the same system. The Kremlin is trying to protect itself from instability, but in doing so, it is expanding the very forces that could make that instability worse.

CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Intro: Putin’s Paranoid Fortress in Moscow
01:49 - Kremlin Under Siege: Fear of Internal Sabotage
04:08 - Putin’s Inner Circle: The Billionaire Sons of Russia
05:51 - FSB Surveillance: The Kremlin’s Plan to Monitor You
07:26 - The Shoigu Purge: Corruption and Kremlin Power Shifts
10:18 - Putin vs Dugin: The Fake Ideology of Russia
11:43 - Kadyrov’s Fall: Putin’s End for Chechnya
12:57 - Unit 795: Putin’s Secret Assassination Squad

[OAITW r.2.0]

1. Sounds like bad news, regardless, for the Russian people.

A new power structure to keep expropriating the wealth of the Russian people. Yay.