Many politicians could envy the ease with which Ramzan Kadyrov became the number one newsmaker in the second half of April. As usual, Kadyrov burst into the federal agenda during the conflict, drawing fire from critics: Kadyrov was supported only by the heads of neighboring regions – Ramazan Abdulatipov and Vladimir Vladimirov. Critics spoke of a duel of powers, hybrid federalism, Chechen armed sovereignty, and in the most radical versions – of a third Chechen war.

It is easy to see that all these interpretations are more about Chechnya than about Ramzan Kadyrov himself. The discussions of Kadyrov have been reduced to assessing the risks of his conflict with the security forces, obvious from the point of view of the current moment, but losing their outlines when the optics change.

In Kadyrov's worldview, the security forces, if they have a place at all, are certainly not the center of attention. One of his latest statements on Instagram is quite telling: "In Russia, there is one president, and all the rest are foot soldiers." The head of Chechnya regularly swears allegiance to the president, and with the same regularity, Kadyrov emphasizes that for him there is only one authority - Vladimir Putin, whose orders he is ready to carry out to the last one, even to the point of leaving his post. But this rule does not apply to all other officials, because they are not commanders, but equal in rank, so the chances of him carrying out their orders tend to zero. For an ordinary governor, the authority of Medvedev, Bortnikov, Bastrykin is sky-high, but for Kadyrov, they are foot soldiers with a corresponding level of authority. Where federal officials would like to see themselves, in the words of Yevgeny Minchenko, as members of an influential "Politburo 2.0", whose combined authority is equal to that of the president, Kadyrov sees simple executors. Authority in the Eastern sense exists due to the abyss between the first person and everyone else. This is the authority of Kadyrov himself, and this is how he sees it in others.

But there is a nuance in Kadyrov's metaphor about "Putin's foot soldiers." In the case of the security forces, the emphasis shifts to the first word, and in Kadyrov's case, to the second: they are the foot soldiers, he is Putin's man. And despite Kadyrov's formal equality with Putin's foot soldiers, their relations are established informally, which is what recent events actually show. This shows Ramzan Kadyrov's political formula: first after Putin. In the Russian political system, claims to first place are taboo, and all the real struggle is for second place, which is quite honorable, since it is not the result of a loss - it is impossible to lose to Putin, because according to the logic of the system, it is impossible to defeat him. To be first after Putin means to be first among equals. Kadyrov has long ceased to be a regional politician and, depending on the survey methods, to varying degrees, he competes for second place with Shoigu, Medvedev, Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky. "Levada Center", for example, found out a month ago that Kadyrov is "trusted" and "rather trusted" by almost 55% of Russians. But this competition again is not a here-and-now struggle for specific posts and decisions, but a struggle for the future, in which there will be many reasons and people who want to weaken Kadyrov. So Kadyrov's political formula is simultaneously a formula for his survival.

Bastrykin, Bortnikov, Kolokoltsev and other security officials in this situation are a burden that prevents Kadyrov from taking the place he needs. The place that alone allows him to conduct a dialogue with the first person without any intermediaries. Kadyrov does not need any intermediaries, any intermediate authorities, because in the system of vertical power they always strive to take the place of the main authority - this is the essence of subordination, which Peskov reminded Kadyrov about and who himself, as another intermediary, is not really needed by Kadyrov. To integrate into this vertical, which is essentially a vertical of intermediaries, to accept its authority - means to sharply and unacceptably lower your own authority, since in the vertical of intermediaries, authority decreases along with the level of power in geometric progression.

There are serious doubts that Kadyrov needs a war with the security forces to raise his own authority: for a person who claims to be the first after Putin, his personal foot soldier, this is beneath his dignity. In general, all that Kadyrov needs is for no one to interfere in his dialogue with Putin, and for agreements not to be burdened with their intrusive mediation. Those wishing to act as mediators have been shown the door. And the methods of getting rid of the services of intermediaries have been promised to correspond to the methods of intervention: for those who interfere with words - Kadyrov's critics - a response will be found, and those who interfere in affairs on the territory of the Chechen Republic will be dealt with in practice.

The author is a senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Law of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Yekaterinburg