From auditor to marketer: what is known about assassination attempt survivor Andrei Chibis

Editorial “Layout”April 05, 2024 |

Governor of the Murmansk region Andrey Chibis successfully underwent surgery after the attack

Russian Railways employee Alexander Bydanov wounded the governor of the Murmansk region, Andrei Chibis, with a knife in the stomach due to “personal hostility,” the Investigative Committee reported. The preventive measure will be taken on Bydanov on Saturday right in the hospital, where he lies with a bullet wound to his leg, which he received during his arrest.

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The attack on the Murmansk governor is the fourth officially confirmed attempt on the life of the current head of the region in the history of Putin’s Russia. Chibis is considered one of the most prominent governors of Russia - he tries to promote the brand of the Arctic, regularly meets with citizens and conflicts with local elites.

What is known about the assassination attempt on the governor of the Murmansk region Andrei Chibis?

For the first time after the assassination attempt, Andrei Chibis appeared in public on the morning of April 5. In his official Telegram channel, he posted a video where he, with a tube in his nose and lying on a hospital bed, thanks everyone for their support and promises to soon return to his duties in order to move “only forward.” By the evening, Chibis was transported by air ambulance helicopter from the Apatity-Kirov regional hospital in Apatity, where he had been operated on the night before, to the regional hospital in Murmansk. Chibis's deputy, Nadezhda Aksyonova, will act as governor.

The attack occurred on the evening of April 4 when the governor was leaving the building of the local cultural center, where he was meeting with city residents. At the event itself, “the governor did not get involved in any conflicts,” an eyewitness to the meeting told Vorstka. Already on the street, 42-year-old local resident Alexander Bydanov ran up to Chibis, jumped out of his Toyota Corolla, stabbed the governor in the stomach and tried to run away. But the Russian Guard officer guarding the meeting first wounded Bydanov in the leg and then detained him. Chibis's intestines were damaged, but his vital organs were not critically damaged.

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For Chibis, meetings like the one he held in Apatity are ordinary events. About once a week, he announces a visit to a particular municipality on his social networks and invites citizens to chat. “This is almost always some kind of large assembly hall, dozens of people gather there. Some problematic issues are discussed there regularly, but not in the format of accusations, but in the form of requests to the governor for help. The security there is purely symbolic,” a local journalist told Vorstka. Colleagues call Chibis one of the brightest and most active governors in the country.

How did Andrei Chibis become governor of the Murmansk region?

Andrey Chibis is from Chuvashia. In 2001, he graduated from the Cheboksary Cooperative Institute, where he studied to become a lawyer, and in 2004, from a local university in a management training program. But Chibis’s political career began in the Ryazan region, where in 2004 he worked in the election headquarters of the former Airborne Forces commander Grigory Shpak, who was running for governor and was at that time a member of the Rodina party Dmitry Rogozin. Shpak won the election against United Russia member Igor Morozov (now a senator from the Ryazan region) in the second round, and Chibis became his adviser. Chibis's chief at Shpak's headquarters was another high-status military man - general and State Duma deputy Mikhail Babich, now the first deputy head of the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation, and before that the presidential envoy to the Volga Federal District and the Russian Ambassador to Belarus. It was Babich’s support that, in conversations with a Vestka journalist, sources in the federal government explained Chibis’ career rise.

From 2014 to 2019, Chibis served as the chief state housing inspector of the Russian Federation and at the same time deputy minister of housing and communal services. At this time, according to regional officials, he was “one of the most unpleasant federal visitors” who came to them with inspections. He regularly publicly reprimanded local leaders for problems in the housing and communal services sector, threatening sanctions, criminal cases and resignations. And in March 2019, he himself became one of these inspected people, heading the Murmansk region as acting governor.

Almost immediately, he, like his predecessors Marina Kovtun and Dmitry Dmitrienko, came into conflict with the so-called “urban” clan of Murmansk, the informal leader of which is considered to be the ex-mayor of the city, and now a State Duma deputy from the Norilsk district of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Mikhail Weller. Local telegram channels, which Murmansk politicians and journalists considered to be controlled by Chibis or Weller’s team, constantly harshly criticized their opponents. However, the public peak of the confrontation can be called the end of 2021, when United Russia Secretary General Andrei Turchak had to go to Murmansk to help Chibis push his candidates for speaker and city manager through the city council. As a result, after several unsuccessful voting attempts, the “candidate from Chibis” Yuri Serdechkin was elected mayor.

Chibis’s most famous initiative as governor is promoting the region’s brand called “Live in the North!” Under this slogan, several social and cultural programs are being implemented in the region, and even merch is being produced, in which Chibis himself is often shown in public. In addition, shortly before the start of the war, the governor promoted Murmansk as the “capital of the Arctic” in connection with the Russian Federation’s chairmanship of the Arctic Council (Russia’s membership in it was suspended after the start of the war with Ukraine), as well as the large-scale project of the satellite city “New Murmansk”, which was never implemented.

However, calls to stay in the region are of little help: the Murmansk region is regularly among the country's leaders in depopulation. According to Rosstat, at the end of 2019, the first year under the leadership of Chibis, 741 thousand people lived in the region; as of January 1, 2024, there were 656 thousand. According to the Ministry of Construction of the Russian Federation, the region is consistently among the subjects with the lowest rates of new housing commissioning.

How will the assassination attempt affect the future career of Andrei Chibis?

Vestka's interlocutors close to the presidential administration say that the attack is unlikely to affect the political prospects of Andrei Chibis. “Tomorrow everyone will forget about this attack. And as planned for re-election in September, that’s how it is planned for now,” one of them explained to Vorstka. The last governor of the Murmansk region to serve two full terms was Yuri Evdokimov, who led the region from 1996 to 2009. All of his successors retired early.

Andrei Chibis is the fourth current governor during the years of Vladimir Putin’s rule to become the victim of an assassination attempt officially confirmed by the security forces. Two heads of regions - President of Chechnya Akhmat Kadyrov (blowed up at the stadium in Grozny on May 9, 2004) and Governor of the Magadan Region Valentin Tsvetkov (shot by a killer in Moscow on October 18, 2002) did not survive the attacks. The leader of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, was blown up by terrorists in his car on June 22, 2009, but survived, receiving serious injuries: for example, doctors had to replace part of his skull with a metal plate.

Let us recall that we previously wrote about how Russians have become accustomed to war and how Putin’s current re-election differs from the three previous ones.

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