Russia's defiant defence minister has been filmed in the war zone looking at military positions with his commanders as he takes on bid to oust him over the Ukraine conflict.
Sergei Shoigu today made clear he was not going to go easily as he was seen in a meeting with top brass and being shown the battle positions from the air.
He was facing down a demand from coup-plotting Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner mercenary army, that his head should roll along with chief of the army Gen Valery Gerasimov.
Prigozhin - a long-time Putin associate - said the pair should take the blame for the incompetence of Russia ’s war campaign in Ukraine.
Yet Shoigu, 68, who was out of sight on Sunday, was seen in footage released by his ministry early on Monday dressed in military fatigues meeting Russia’s Western group of troops and receiving a report from Colonel-General Yevgeny Nikiforov.
Shoigu was said to have “listened to a report from the commander of the Western group, Col-Gen Nikiforov, on the current situation at the front” and the “nature of enemy actions”.
Meanwhile, Prigozhin, 62, has not been spotted since agreeing a deal to turn back his coup forces marching on Moscow.
He was due to travel into exile in authoritarian Belarus as part of the quick-fix pact with Putin, but there is no sign he has done so.
Rumours are swirling in Moscow that Putin, 70, has lined up Tula governor and ex-deputy defence minister Alexei Dyumin, 50, to be the next defence minister, replacing Shoigu.
He is a trusted former Putin bodyguard who once saved the Kremlin leader from attack by a brown bear and is rumoured to have played a role in the pact which stopped the coup march into Moscow on Saturday.
Along with this, he is believed to be involved in secret funding channels used by the Kremlin elite.
So far Putin has not fired any of his top team - many now in their late sixties or early seventies - during the war.
Gerasmov, 67, also remains in post so far despite Prigozhin’s demands for him to be fired and even prosecuted.
Planes linked to Putin and his presidential entourage returned to Moscow amid suggestions that he had sat out Saturday’s dramatic events at his palace in Valdai - north of Moscow - which he supposedly shares with secret lover Alina Kabaeva, 40, and their undisclosed children.
Footage emerged today of the Russian military machine’s bombing of a road in Voronezh region as it sought to stop the coup march.
Estimates suggest Putin lost up to 39 air crew blasted out of the sky by Wagner forces on Saturday, as well as six helicopters, an Il-22 commander and control plane.
Dyumin has been long rumoured for promotion and some analysts see him as Putin’s chosen heir.
They had assumed he would be catapulted into the role of prime minister at the point when Putin was ready to quit due to political problems or ill health.
Pro-war commentators were overnight talking up the prospect of Dyumin being appointed defence minister and Putin has several times travelled to Tula to meet Dyumin during the war.
On the famed occasion he saved Putin from a bear at his presidential mountain retreat he said: "Naturally, I was armed, the president was upstairs.
“So the bear and I looked into each other’s eyes, and he stepped back a little. I opened the door and emptied the entire cartridge of my pistol under his feet.”
The animal retreated.
"I felt pity for the bear,” said Dyumin and Putin later praised him for not killing it.
