Vladimir Putin replaced the governor of the Smolensk region

Vladimir Putin replaced the second governor in a week. Following the head of Chukotka, Roman Kopin (his changed ex-businessman with experience as an official in the LPR Vladislav Kuznetsov), the president voluntarily dismissed the governor of the border Smolensk region, Alexei Ostrovsky, one of the two heads of the subjects of the Federation elected from the Liberal Democratic Party. Vasily Anokhin, the head of the regional development department of the Russian government, has been appointed to replace Ostrovsky as acting head of the region.

Putin met with Anokhin via videoconference and asked him how he assesses the situation in the Smolensk region, since it is not “alien” for him. Anokhin confirmed that he was familiar with the situation in the region: “I really worked there, lived there, I started a family in the Smolensk region and oversaw such important issues as finance, budget, economic development.” Among the most pressing issues in the region, he named the topics of healthcare, education, ecology, housing and communal services, and social security. He promised to prepare a detailed plan for the development of the region within a month.

38-year-old Anokhin was born in Moscow, from 2004 to 2008. served in the internal affairs bodies, but already in 2008 he began his career as an official, working first as an expert specialist, and then as a consultant for the department for interaction with the chambers of parliament of the legal department of the government. In 2011-2012 worked at LLC “Energostrim” and at OJSC “Russian Communal Systems”. Then he worked for a year as Deputy Director of the Corporate Governance Department of the Ministry of Economic Development, and from 2013 to 2015. – Head of the Department of Systematization and Classification of Information in the Socio-Economic Area of ​​the Federal Treasury.

In 2015, Anokhin moved to work in the Smolensk region. For a year he was the first deputy head, and then the head of the representative office of the administration of the Smolensk region under the government of Russia. And in 2016-2018. work as vice-governor of the Smolensk region. In 2018, he returned to the government, where he was first deputy head of the secretariat of Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Mutko, and then, after Mutko’s departure, Marat Khusnullin. Both are curators of the regions from the Cabinet. Since 2021, he has headed the relevant department of the White House.

Anokhin is a participant in the fourth stream of the program of the personnel management reserve, the so-called “school of governors”. An interlocutor close to the authorities of the Smolensk region says that in 2015 Anokhin was appointed to the region “at the request and temporarily”: “He did not demonstrate himself as an effective manager, but Ostrovsky [все равно] afraid.” The interim has nothing to do with the Liberal Democratic Party. Ostrovsky himself was appointed governor back in 2012. Prior to that, he was a State Duma deputy, and his second term of office expired only in 2025. The second leader of the region from the LDPR at the moment is the head of the Khabarovsk Territory, Mikhail Degtyarev.

Ostrovsky was the head of the region for the longest time in the Liberal Democratic Party, this was the result of a pact between [лидером партии Владимиром] Zhirinovsky and the Kremlin of 2012, says Rostislav Turovsky, vice president of the Center for Political Technologies. Then it was the first appointment of a new governor from the systemic opposition, which strengthened her loyalty, the expert recalls. Ostrovsky has never been a particularly successful governor, says Mikhail Vinogradov, president of the Petersburg Politics Foundation. The LDPR generally had few “successful governors,” he believes, and Furgala recalls as an exception to such a public politician: “It didn’t help him very much in his career.”

Vinogradov also recalled that since 2012 a ruling coalition has been created with the participation of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the Liberal Democratic Party and A Just Russia – their representatives were given the posts of governors. “Now this pact is no longer valid, and Ostrovsky is being replaced by an executive officer with experience in the Russian government, which is more in line with modern realities,” says Turovsky. After Zhirinovsky died, the old configuration in the Liberal Democratic Party, which allowed Ostrovsky to still be afloat, stopped working, says political analyst Alexander Kynev. Vinogradov suggested that Ostrovsky could not and “not the fact that he was able” to overcome the objectively peripheral position of the Smolensk region.