Sergei Ivanov, a former defense minister and the man who came closer than anyone else to the Russian presidency in the 2000s, died on June 26. After Vladimir Putin chose Dmitry Medvedev over Ivanov as his successor, Ivanov served as deputy prime minister in the 2008–2011 cabinet and later as the president’s chief of staff. In 2016, however, he moved to the post of presidential envoy for environmental affairs and transportation, which he held until February 2026. He appears to have retired because of health problems. At Meduza’s request, a Russian journalist who has studied Ivanov’s biography reflects on his life and how, despite a spectacular defeat in 2007, he found his calling on the sidelines of government service.

The first to report that the 73-year-old Sergei Ivanov had died was the VTB United League, the basketball organization where he served as honorary president. It was a fitting detail for a man who, over the last decade, had busied himself not with the army (Ivanov was defense minister in the 2000s) or domestic politics, but with leopards, the environment, and sports.

No cause of death was given. President Putin was among those who sent condolences to the family. As far back as 2000, Putin spoke of the “sense of camaraderie” he felt at Ivanov’s side.

Seven years later, the Kremlin concocted a strange succession contest, in which Ivanov — according to polls and approval ratings — came out ahead. But Putin’s final decision went against him.

Ivanov’s biography is almost always told as the story of a president who never was. In the summer of 2007, when he was first deputy prime minister, polls by the Levada Center showed that about a third of Russians would have voted for him in an election — more than for his rival, Dmitry Medvedev.

Ivanov seemed a confident front-runner, carrying himself with a Western ease — jacket unbuttoned, hands in his pockets. He spoke English in a way other Kremlin officials could not, and he promised that by 2025 Russia would become the world’s third-largest aircraft-manufacturing power and that GDP per capita would climb to $30,000. But something went wrong — in Ivanov’s forecasts and in his fortunes alike.

Ivanov’s career was always tied to the security services. At a Leningrad school specializing in English, he had dreamed since childhood of seeing the homeland of the Beatles. A translation student at Leningrad State University, he was sent for an internship at the very same college in Ealing, London, from which Freddie Mercury had graduated five years earlier.

After college, men in plain clothes were already waiting for him. In 1976, Ivanov completed the KGB’s advanced courses in Minsk and was assigned to the directorate for Leningrad and the Leningrad region, where, at the age of 23, he met the young Putin. Unlike Putin, who left the security services in the early 1990s, Ivanov stayed in intelligence. By the time Putin became director of the FSB, his old friend from Leningrad already headed the European desk in foreign intelligence. It was from there that Putin brought him on as a deputy.

Whereas Medvedev served Putin mainly as an aide who carried out instructions, Ivanov was among the first names Putin gave when listing the advisers he trusted.

In 2001, Ivanov became the Russian Federation’s first civilian defense minister. Experts were unimpressed by his military reforms, giving them a “C-plus.” Defense spending tripled. The army was cut by 210,000 troops, with relatively little pain. But the shift to a contract force stalled, and money for contract soldiers’ housing and salaries fell short. Ivanov revived major exercises and resumed rearmament, but he failed to change the army in any fundamental way — his successor, Anatoly Serdyukov, would do that later.

Ivanov could hardly be called quiet: the minister never minced words. He had made diplomatic rudeness routine before it became a political trend. “Let them join whatever they want — even the League of Sexual Reform,” he snapped in 2002, commenting on Georgia’s attempt to join NATO.

His tongue nearly proved his undoing during the “Andrei Sychev affair” — the case of a conscript from Chelyabinsk maimed in a hazing incident, a story every news outlet covered in 2006. With the scandal breaking while he was in the mountains of Armenia, Ivanov dismissed reporters’ questions days later at a news conference: “I think there’s nothing very serious there; otherwise I would certainly know about it.”

The prosecutor’s office, close to Igor Sechin — another Putin ally — then mounted a campaign against the minister. But Ivanov’s patron was more influential than Sechin, and he came out on top.

Curiously, Ivanov was always considered a silovik (a member of Russia’s security-services elite), yet among the siloviki he was never one of them. That was exactly what they called him — “a silovik with no clan.” Despite his background in intelligence, he did not align himself with this wing — which included Sechin; Viktor Ivanov, the head of the Federal Drug Control Service; and Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov — and he kept his distance from the liberals as well.

Ivanov had always operated alone and never really had a team of his own. When the question of a successor came up in 2007 and the Kremlin decided to make the deputy prime minister one of its two main favorites, it was those Kremlin strategists and PR men who manufactured his rise — not Ivanov.

Within six months, his ratings caught up with and overtook those of his rival, Dmitry Medvedev. But they had no effect on the decision of the one and only voter who mattered. Despite that “sense of camaraderie,” Putin did not trust his longtime ally, and he preferred the weaker candidate — the one who would later hand the seat back.

“He basically crashed and burned because of everything going on around him,” a source close to the Kremlin told Meduza at the time. “He’d genuinely come to believe he was on his way to the presidency. And, as always, there was no shortage of generous souls willing to pass word back to the administration that Ivanov’s people were already carving up cabinet seats.”

Ivanov took his defeat in the succession race quietly. He stayed on Putin’s team. After 2007 came the long, less visible part of his career. Ivanov oversaw the defense industry within the government and all but disappeared. People remembered him again in December 2011. Amid the protests, Medvedev made him head of the Kremlin administration.

Hopes that Ivanov would pull the crumbling apparatus together came to nothing: domestic policy was handled by his deputy, Vyacheslav Volodin; more and more of the work passed Ivanov by; and, as a Meduza source described that period, “if the boss is always out of the loop, people simply stop calling him.” Putin championed tigers — Ivanov had his own project, the endangered Far Eastern leopards.

According to people who knew him, he lost interest in the work for good in 2014, when his elder son, Alexander, the deputy chairman of Vnesheconombank, died in the Emirates. Ivanov, who was never known for building personal business empires, promoted his children more visibly than he did himself: his younger son Sergei also built a career at Alrosa and Sberbank.

In August 2016, Putin relieved Ivanov of his leadership of the administration, replacing him with Ivanov’s own deputy, Anton Vaino. The new position — presidential envoy for environmental affairs and transportation — was an honorable retirement, one that suited both Ivanov’s love of work trips and his fondness for animals.

But his nearly 10 years on the job turned out to be surprisingly substantive. The leopards went from a private hobby to a state project: Ivanov initiated the creation of a unified national park, the “Land of the Leopard,” in Primorye and became one of the driving forces behind the Year of Ecology declared in 2017.

He then took up the “garbage reform,” insisting that waste is potential income. A believer in the sector’s high-tech promise, he pressed colleagues on the need to build some 200 recycling plants across Russia.

At Ivanov’s initiative, the principle of “one hectare cut down, one hectare planted” was written into forestry law. He also proposed introducing an environmental levy on plastic bags, toughening the penalties for grass burning, and imposing fines on unruly airline passengers. And the North–South transport corridor, he forecast, would compete with the Suez Canal.

None of this had looked like big-league politics for a long time, but formally Ivanov remained in the game: since 2012, he had been a permanent member of the Security Council. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he — like almost everyone in Putin’s circle — was hit with sanctions. In February 2022, the European Union added him to its sanctions list, citing his support for the immediate recognition of the “self-proclaimed republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk. He then landed on the sanctions lists of Ukraine, the United States, Britain, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, Japan, and New Zealand.

As far back as 2014, Ivanov had taken a hard line on Ukraine, accusing Ukrainians of having been “ruined” by their rejection of “traditional values.” By the winter of 2025, his rhetoric was virtually indistinguishable from that of Medvedev, his onetime rival for the presidency. “A struggle is underway between light and darkness, spirituality and soullessness, traditional and pseudo-liberal values, and, in time, between truth and falsehood,” Ivanov said at a meeting of the board of trustees of the Russian Military Historical Society. “And there is no doubt that, just as 80 years ago, we will win.”

On paper, Ivanov’s career reads as a failure — the story of a man who came within reach of Russia’s highest office and fell short. But he may be better understood as one of the rare figures in Putin’s circle to have survived his own political death, quietly serving out another decade — not in disgrace, but no longer in the inner circle of his old friend.

Unlike Medvedev, who’s never found his footing in wartime Russia, Ivanov was doing work he truly loved and had long since given up chasing power and the president’s attention. He’d lost that fight once already and didn’t want to play again.

Meduza