In a rare display of discord in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin has demanded an end to feuding by powerful clans in the Russian security services.

The President waded into a conflict that started after senior officials from the Federal Drug Control Service were arrested for alleged corruption by agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB.

Viktor Cherkesov, the head of the drugs agency, complained publicly about an “internecine war” between the secret services that threatened to wreck the stability achieved during Mr Putin’s presidency. He gave warning of a split in the “Chekist community”, using the name of the KGB’s predecessor, which he argued had held Russia together after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “There can be no winners in this war. There is too much at stake,” Mr Cherkesov wrote in the newspaper Kommersant. “Any corporation, including the Chekist one, should respect norms in order to be healthy . . . If these norms disappear and there is arbitrariness then the corporation collapses.”

Mr Cherkesov and Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB, are close allies of Mr Putin. The infighting led to speculation that elements of the security services were positioning themselves to safeguard their empires before the presidential elections in March.

Mr Putin sought to restore calm by appointing Mr Cherkesov to lead a new antidrugs committee on a par with an existing state antiterrorism committee led by Mr Patrushev. However, he also criticised Mr Cherkesov for exposing tensions within the Kremlin elite. “If I was in the shoes of the people who are trying to protect the honour of their uniform, I would not throw out accusations left and right, especially not through the media,” Mr Putin told Kommersant.“If someone is behaving in this way, making these sorts of accusations about a war among secret services, that person himself must be beyond reproach.”

The dispute grew when FSB agents arrested Aleksander Bulbov and two other drug control officers at Domodedovo airport in Moscow on October 1. Mr Bulbov, regarded widely as Mr Cherkesov’s right-hand man, was accused of taking bribes and ordering illegal wiretaps. Analysts have suggested that the FSB was taking revenge in a continuing battle between corrupt government agencies for control of money and business in Russia.

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