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The man who ‘invented Putinism’ has been detained in Russia and is under house arrest, say reports in Moscow.
If confirmed, the move against Vladislav Surkov appears to show Vladimir Putin is turning on his inner circle, and also deep splits among his closest henchmen.
Unconfirmed accounts say Putin’s ‘ideologist’ is being held in a wide-ranging criminal probe that has also seen the arrest of 150 FSB agents.
Vladislav Surkov (right), the man who ‘invented Putinism’, has been detained in Russia and is under house arrest
If confirmed, the move against Surkov appears to show Vladimir Putin is turning on his inner circle, and also deep splits among his closest henchmen
The case evidently involves the alleged embezzlement of $5 billion (£3.85billion) by the secret services to create an undercover and intelligence network in Ukraine.
The shadowy Surkov, seen as crucial to Putin’s long-running electoral success, was the man who encouraged him to believe Ukraine is not a real country.
The 57-year-old is a former Kremlin insider, more recently a Putin point man in Ukraine.
Before Putin sent troops into Ukraine, Surkov called for Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states to be annexed.
The detention of senior FSB figure Col-General Sergei Beseda, 68, now held in grim Lefortovo jail, is seen as a linked case.
Kurkov is also close to the leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov (pictured together), who is muscling in on the war
Putin is said to be furious at intelligence failings in Ukraine after huge investment over many years to ensure Russian support in key places.
Russian outlet Buninskaya Alleya reported: ‘More and more sources report that Vladislav Surkov is under house arrest.
‘Investigative measures have been carried out allegedly in the case of embezzlement in the Donbas since 2014….
‘It was Surkov who was the representative of the Russian President in Ukraine.’
Telegram channel Druid reported: ‘According to our sources, Vladislav Surkov is under house arrest.’
Russian opposition politician Ilya Ponomarev also highlighted the detention claims and pointed at Kurkov’s closeness to the leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.
Kadyrov is seen as muscling in on the war, and in his role as a Lt-Gen in the national guard demanding that Putin invades all of Ukraine.
This has caused a split in Putin’s inner circle.
The detention of senior FSB figure Col-General Sergei Beseda, 68, now held in grim Lefortovo jail, is seen as a linked case
Surkov was formerly deputy head of the Russian presidential administration from 1999 to 2011.
He has been called Putin’s ‘main ideologist’, devising the concept of ‘sovereign democracy’ as a mask for authoritarianism.
He advocated the need to defend Russians beyond the borders of the motherland – a key plank in Putin’s annexation of Crimea and bossing of the Donbas.
‘The Russian world is something bigger than Russia itself,’ said Surkov.
‘Because we are in fact a dispersed people, our population stretches well beyond our own borders.
‘What is the Russian world to me? It’s everywhere, where people speak Russian and think like Russians, or where they respect Russian culture.’
Once described as ‘the hidden author of Putinism’, he advocated an outward look of democratic norms with timely elections in which the results are preordained.
He also convinced Putin that, as Surkov said: ‘There is no Ukraine. There is Ukrainianness.
‘That is, a specific mental disorder. An amazing enthusiasm for ethnography, taken to an extreme…
‘There is no nation.’
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