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| Sergei Ilnitsky/AP |
Business
Insider(Reuters) --- President Vladimir Putin dismissed two senior
officials on Monday in a surprise move that followed recent rumors of feuding
at the heart of the Kremlin.
The twin sackings
come less than a month after the killing of Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov, which
had exposed rarely seen tensions between various factions within Putin's inner
elite.
Putin's spokesman
Dmitry Peskov said Oleg Morozov, 61, was leaving his post as head of the
president's domestic policy department because of family reasons.
Peskov also
announced the departure of head of the international cooperation department,
Sergei Bolkhovitin, but gave no reason for his removal. His department deals
with technical aspects of foreign cooperation.
Morozov was
replaced by Tatyana Voronova, who previously headed the youth section of
Putin's ruling United Russia party, served as a lawmaker and sat on the
country's central elections committee before moving to the Kremlin in early
2013.
Analysts said
Voronova is a protege of Vyacheslav Volodin -- Putin's first deputy chief of
staff who was blacklisted by the European Union last year for what the bloc
said was his role in the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine .
Commentators saw
her appointment as a possible signal that the Kremlin was gearing up for local
elections due in some regions later this year as well as national parliamentary
polls due in 2016.
No successor was
named for Bolkhovitin.
The sense of
intrigue at the Kremlin this month was heightened when Putin vanished from
public view for 10 days. The president laughed off his disappearance when he
finally re-emerged at a public event on March 16.
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